At the United Nations General Assembly deliberations on the Right to Development, CNRI Secretary General Binod Anand argued that the world’s four great shocks — in food, fertiliser, fuel and finance — are really one crisis of ownership. His answer, Sahkar Se Samriddhi, was born in India’s villages. The world would be wise to take it seriously.
The week the vocabulary changed
Walk the corridors of the United Nations in the last week of September and you hear a familiar lexicon: supply-chain resilience, debt distress, energy transition, food security, fiscal space. It is the language of treasuries and central banks, and it is spoken mostly by those who manage economies from above. This year, a phrase from a very different vocabulary made its way into those rooms — a Hindi phrase that India’s cooperative movement has carried from village to village: Sahkar Se Samriddhi, prosperity through cooperation.
It was carried there by Shri Binod Anand, Secretary General of the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) and Founder & Executive President of the World Cooperative Economic Forum (WCOOPEF). On 23 September 2026 he took part in the General Assembly deliberations on the Right to Development, and followed them with a series of meetings on geopolitics and the global economy, including discussions with senior management of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA).
The venue matters, but the argument matters more. Stripped to its core, it is this: the crises that dominate every global summit are not four separate emergencies but one connected chain, and the people most exposed to that chain — smallholder farmers, rural women, fishers, dairy producers and informal workers — have the least say over how it works. Until that changes, no amount of emergency finance will make the world food-secure, energy-secure or financially stable.
Four crises, one chain
Consider the life of a small farmer anywhere in the Global South. Her yield depends on fertiliser. Fertiliser depends on natural gas and on a handful of global producers. Energy prices move with wars, sanctions and shipping routes. Diesel for her pump and her tractor follows the same markets. When input costs rise and harvest prices do not, she borrows — often from informal lenders at ruinous rates. A shock in a distant sea lane becomes, within a season, a debt in her village.
Food, fertiliser, fuel and finance are therefore not four headlines but four links in one chain. What makes the chain dangerous is not only its fragility but its ownership. The links are controlled far from the farm, by concentrated markets and by capital that is mobile when the farmer is not. When the chain snaps, the gains of scarcity accrue at the top and the losses settle at the bottom.
“The world’s crises of food, fertiliser, fuel and finance are no longer separate problems. They are one geoeconomic chain, and whoever controls that chain controls the fate of billions of small producers.” — Binod Anand, Secretary General, CNRI
The real fault line of our age is ownership
Much of today’s development debate is framed as a contest between the state and the market. Should governments subsidise inputs, or should markets be freed? Should aid flow through ministries, or through private investment? Both camps tend to share one blind spot: they treat the rural producer as a recipient — of subsidy, of credit, of technology, of charity — rather than as an owner.
The cooperative idea breaks this pattern. A cooperative is neither a department of the state nor a firm owned by distant shareholders. It is an enterprise owned and governed by the very people who use it. When farmers own the procurement centre, the price they receive is no longer a number handed down to them. When they own the credit society, interest stays in the village. When they own the processing plant, the value added by processing returns as dividends instead of leaving as profit.
India knows this from experience. Its dairy cooperatives turned a nation of milk shortages into one of the world’s largest milk producers by linking millions of small producers directly to markets they collectively owned. Its fertiliser and credit cooperatives have for decades given farmers access that the market alone would not have provided. The creation of a dedicated Ministry of Cooperation in 2021, and the global attention of the UN International Year of Cooperatives in 2025, have given this tradition fresh momentum. What Shri Anand took to New York was the claim that this experience is not a national curiosity but a transferable development strategy.
The Cooperative Economic Framework: cooperation as economic security
At the heart of CNRI’s interventions was its Cooperative Economic Framework (CEF). The framework’s central move is to stop treating cooperatives as welfare institutions and start treating them as strategic economic architecture. In the CEF view, three things matter most: transparent local markets, member-owned finance, and farmer-controlled supply chains.
Each of these does more than raise incomes. Transparent local markets reduce the space for cartels, hoarding and price manipulation. Member-owned finance brings the unbanked into a formal, accountable system, and in doing so shrinks the pool of vulnerable people that predatory lenders, Ponzi schemes and financial criminals prey upon. Farmer-controlled supply chains keep critical inputs and data in accountable hands. Taken together, they build economic sovereignty from the ground up — not the sovereignty of a state over its borders alone, but the sovereignty of a community over its own livelihood.
This is where the framework speaks directly to geopolitics. In an age when trade, energy and finance are increasingly used as instruments of pressure, a country whose farmers depend entirely on distant, concentrated suppliers is exposed. A country whose farmers own a meaningful share of their inputs, credit and markets is harder to coerce. Cooperation, in this sense, is not merely an economic model. It is a form of resilience.
“Our Cooperative Economic Framework offers a different answer: when farmers own the chain, from seed and soil to credit and clean energy, supply shocks become shared burdens instead of private windfalls, and development becomes a right exercised rather than a promise awaited.” — Binod Anand
From field to flame: a green transition villages can own
Shri Anand’s discussions spanned the full breadth of the rural economy — crop agriculture, dairy and fisheries, fertiliser access, rural credit and cooperative insurance — but he gave particular weight to the energy transition. Here the cooperative argument becomes especially concrete.
Too often, green energy arrives in rural areas as something done to communities: land leased for projects whose revenues flow elsewhere. The cooperative alternative is energy owned by the community. Compressed biogas and circular bio-economy models show how. Crop residue and dairy waste, which today are often burned or wasted, can be converted into fuel. The residue of that process becomes organic fertiliser that returns to the soil. A single cooperative biogas plant is therefore at once an energy asset, a fertiliser source, a waste-management system and a financial institution for its members.
In one installation, three of the four crises — fuel, fertiliser and finance — are addressed together, and the fourth, food, benefits through healthier soils and lower input costs. This is what makes the four-crisis framing more than rhetoric: the solutions, like the problems, are connected.
Forty years on: the unfinished business of the Right to Development
The timing gives the argument added weight. In December 1986 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development, which described development as an inalienable human right — a right belonging to people, and not merely a target pursued by governments. As the Declaration approaches its fortieth anniversary, its promise remains uneven. Growth has come to many countries; ownership of that growth has not come to many people.
That is the gap the cooperative model addresses. A right that people cannot exercise through institutions they control remains, in practice, a promise. Cooperatives are one of the few institutions through which ordinary people can collectively exercise economic rights — to fair prices, to affordable credit, to a share in the value they create.
“As we mark forty years of the Declaration on the Right to Development, the question before the United Nations is not whether the Global South needs growth, but who will own it. Sahkar Se Samriddhi turns people from beneficiaries into stakeholders. That is the cooperative firewall the world needs against market concentration, financial exclusion and economic coercion.” — Binod Anand
From speeches to structures
Global forums are not short of good speeches. What distinguishes an idea that lasts is whether it is translated into institutions. On this count, the week produced something tangible. In his meetings with UN DESA, Shri Anand proposed a strategic collaboration titled “Cooperatives as Infrastructure for Inclusive, Digital and Sustainable Development.” The proposal has four notable components:
- A Global South Cooperative Policy Lab, to help governments design cooperative-friendly laws, regulation and public programmes.
- A Cooperatives & VNRs Toolkit, so that countries can reflect cooperative contributions in their Voluntary National Reviews on the Sustainable Development Goals.
- A UN–Global South Cooperative Development Dialogue, a standing platform for cooperatives to speak directly into UN development processes.
- A Coop-Eco Digital & AI Literacy Mission, to ensure that the digital and AI transition strengthens member-owned institutions rather than bypassing them.
A 12-month pilot has been proposed. If it moves forward, cooperative economics would gain a structured place in UN development work — where it has too often been treated as a niche subject rather than as core development strategy.
What India must do at home
There is, however, an obligation that comes with carrying this message abroad. The world will judge Sahkar Se Samriddhi not by the eloquence of its advocates but by the performance of India’s own cooperatives. That places a clear agenda before policymakers and the cooperative movement at home.
- Integrity first. Cooperatives that are captured by local elites or used for patronage undermine the entire argument. Transparent elections, professional audits and digital record-keeping are not administrative details; they are the foundation of credibility.
- Digital, but member-owned. Digitisation of primary societies should strengthen members’ control over their data and decisions, not transfer it to distant platforms.
- Women and youth at the centre. A cooperative movement that does not bring in rural women and young people as owners and leaders will not survive the next generation.
- Finance that reaches the last mile. Cooperative credit and cooperative insurance must become the first choice of rural families, not the last resort.
- Energy as a cooperative sector. Rural bio-energy, solar and circular-economy projects should have a clear cooperative pathway in policy and finance.
Our view
For decades, ideas about development have flowed from the capitals of the world down to its villages. This September, at the United Nations, an idea travelled in the opposite direction — from India’s villages to the world’s most important multilateral forum. It carried a simple but demanding claim: the answer to the most complex economic shocks of our time may lie in one of humanity’s oldest institutions, people pooling their strength to own what shapes their lives.
The question before the world is not whether cooperation is a noble idea. It is whether governments, multilateral institutions and development financiers are prepared to treat cooperatives as infrastructure — to fund them, legislate for them and measure them with the same seriousness they bring to roads, ports and power grids. If they do, Sahkar Se Samriddhi will be remembered not as a slogan spoken in New York, but as a turning point in how the world thinks about who development is for.
About CNRI: The Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) is a national network of rural civil-society organisations working on agriculture, cooperation, financial inclusion and rural livelihoods. It holds Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and has been an Affiliate Member of the OECD International Network on Financial Education (OECD/INFE) since 2011.
Disclosure: Voice of Rural India is associated with CNRI. Views expressed in this editorial feature are those of the Voice of Rural India editorial desk.
