Agricultural cooperatives are established by the government to improve the operation of village credit cooperatives, especially in granting credits and loans to farmer-members for production purpose. The type of agricultural cooperative established during 1959 to 1968 was the co-operative credit societies at an amphoe (district) level. Because of its large size and multi-purpose nature, this type of cooperatives can provide more efficient services to member better than the small sized credit societies. The success of Production Credit Cooperatives convinced the government to organize more large size co-operative societies at district level by way of amalgamating small village credit societies starting in 1969. In the mean time, the production credit cooperatives and the small village credit societies which were merged together have been known as the agricultural cooperatives. From the study of financial statement of the cooperative Audit Department, governmental and private documents and also from the interview arranged with persons concerned with cooperatives work, the finding are presented as follows: In Thailand at the present time, there are 401 agricultural cooperatives with 171,306 members or the average of 427 members for each society. In the beginning, the operations of agricultural cooperative in the form of production credit cooperation have been satisfactory. However, after the amalgamation of small village credit societies since 1969, the progress of the cooperatives has slow due to shortage of fund for lending operations. Moreover, they have been facing with the problems of low formal education in addition to poverty and inexperience in cooperative movement among their members. Thus, the societies have the difficulties of attaining the operational goal in a reasonable period of time. The researcher would like to make some important suggestions for developing and improving the performance of agricultural cooperatives as follows: First, there must be restrictive requirements in admitting qualified members and dismissing the disqualified ones at the time. Second, there must be improvement of management and administration by means of training and providing more knowledge of business methods together with cooperative education for members and committies. They should employ high caliber of managerial personnel. Moreover, cooperatives should dressify their activities into distributing and processing member’s products as well as granting loans and credits. Since these business activities would promote loans operations to greater efficiency. Third, cooperatives should collect their own fund as much as possible for credit operations. Meanwhile, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives which is the most important external source of fund for cooperatives should review the loan policy and operation, the Bank would then make loans to societies with larger amount of money and with more convenient terms for cooperatives. Finally, the government should promote and assist the activities of cooperatives directly and indirectly. Direct assistance could come in the form of free use of government facilities. These will help cooperatives to attain greater efficiency that will serve farmers more satisfactorily in the near future.
