FAO Puts a Human Face on the Region’s Cooperative Food Systems
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has published Voices of Cooperators, a book gathering first-hand accounts from more than 70 cooperators working across agri-food systems in the Near East and North Africa — young leaders, farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, food processors and producers speaking from the fields, rangelands, markets and cooperative spaces where they work every day. The book arrives as the region contends with some of the world’s highest rates of food insecurity, driven by climate shocks, scarcity, economic uncertainty and conflict, and makes its case plainly: cooperation isn’t theory, it’s what happens when farmers meet, decide together, and build value that stays local.
The stories bear that out in full. In Morocco, Ms. Mina Abdaoui describes watching her semi-nomadic pastoral community unravel as rainfall grew scarcer and grazing rights eroded, and the seven women who stayed to build a cooperative preserving traditional knowledge anyway. In Jordan, Mr. Attallah Ali Al-Amareen recounts how water scarcity destroyed a 100-dunum alfalfa farm, and how cooperation, not conflict, resolved a land dispute that once divided his community. From Palestine’s Al-Ibda’ Cooperative, President Ms. Amna Fayez Salem Mustafa writes of protecting food systems under occupation with defiant clarity: “If we had been afraid, we would have closed the co-operative on our first day.” And in Sudan, the Al-Thawra Tenth Neighbourhood Cooperative Association kept its community kitchen running through active conflict, feeding displaced families despite shelling and security risks.
Beyond individual resilience, the book documents cooperatives tackling gender equality, water management, youth engagement, market access and financial inclusion across the region — from beekeepers in Saudi Arabia sharing innovation to women’s agricultural cooperatives in Jordan confronting scarcity head-on. Its conclusion is direct: coherent policymaking and real investment in cooperatives, paired with inclusive governance and stronger partnerships, are what will let this model keep transforming the region’s food systems rather than merely surviving them.
ICA-AP played a key collaborative role in bringing this publication to life, working alongside FAO’s Regional Office for the Near East and North Africa (FAO RNE) and ICA-Africa to co-produce and support the book. The publication builds on a joint initiative between FAO and the ICA’s regional offices, including ICA-AP, to strengthen strategic dialogue and frameworks between governments and cooperatives in the region — exemplified by the Strategic Dialogue on Cooperative Development held in Casablanca, Morocco. Under the leadership of Mr. Balasubramanian Iyer, ICA-AP’s Regional Director, the organisation helped champion the stories of ground-level cooperators featured in the book, using their lived experience to show how cooperative models can transform agrifood systems, build resilience, and empower women and youth across the region.
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- Click here to download Voices of Cooperators directly from FAO.