‘Cooperative needs government monitoring’

Lawmaker D.Togtokhsuren, newly appointed as head of the Mongolian National Association of Cooperatives, met with the board of the association, listened to their suggestions on ways to address the issues facing the cooperatives through state policy, and explore the reasons for the lack of development.

Representative of the association D.Batmunkh said, “The government needs to monitor the activities of traders and individuals who have established cooperatives. It can’t be developed well due to lack of monitoring. There is also a lack of government policy on cooperative development. Every time Parliament changes, it pursues a different policy. From 2008 to 2012, the government paid close attention to cooperatives and began to implement the “One soum-one cooperative” policy in order to expand its activities. However, the next government has turned it into a “one team-one cooperative”. There is a positive policy to transfer the issue of agricultural incentives through cooperatives, but it has been eliminated. In other words, cooperatives do not have a fixed policy.”

“The main role of cooperatives is to prepare raw materials from herders, process them and supply them to the market. However, the main problem for cooperatives is VAT. Second, there is no economic incentive to bring people into the cooperative sector. At the very least, we want to pass on government incentives to cooperatives. The next issue is pastureland. Parliament is raising the issue of payment for pasture usage. This needs to be addressed in another way.”

At the end of the discussion, the sides agreed to raise the issue with Parliament.