Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential role of cooperative models in strengthening economic resilience in developing countries.

Cooperatives and producer organisations have an important role to play in enabling smallholder farmers and communities to access services and markets and raise productivity sustainably. The UK has supported cooperatives and other forms of collective action through the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP) managed by the World Bank, which has a dedicated funding facility for producer organisations, and the Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness Programme (CASA), which provides support to help producer organisations in Africa access markets.