On January 25th, the ICA and the Euricse Institute held a webinar to present the main findings of the 2023 World Cooperative Monitor (WCM). In its twelfth edition, the WCM includes the traditional ranking of the 300 largest cooperatives and mutuals in the world, based on various indicators, as well as employment data and a special report on the advantages of joining a cooperative.
The data collected for the 2023 edition of the WCM, corresponding to the fiscal year 2021, shows that the Top 300 cooperatives continued to grow, registering a combined turnover of $2.4 trillion in 2021, a significant increase from the $2.17 trillion recorded in 2020, the pandemic year.
According to its results, the top position in terms of turnover is held by Groupe Crédit Agricole from France ($117.019 billion USD), followed by the German retailer REWE Group ($82.030 billion), Groupe BPCE from France ($66.060 billion), Nonghyup (National Agricultural Cooperative Federation – NACF) from South Korea ($61.170 billion), and ACDLEC Leclerc from France ($60.560 billion).
At the top of the ranking by turnover relative to per capita GDP is the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative (IFFCO), followed by another Indian cooperative, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation; the financial cooperative Groupe Crédit Agricole, the health cooperative Sistema Unimed from Brazil, and Copersucar SA, also from Brazil.
The webinar featured the participation of the new Director-General of the ICA, Jeroen Douglas, who pointed out that the WCM is an important tool for evaluating the position of cooperatives and demonstrating their impact. “The 12th edition of the World Cooperative Monitor also serves as an action directed at stakeholders and, above all, is tangible evidence of the usefulness of celebrating the International Year of Cooperatives again,” he added.
The webinar also included testimonies from Hans Groeneveld, Director of International Cooperative Affairs at Rabobank and President of ICETT; Kelly Smith, Senior Director of Marketing, Communications, and Corporate Relations at National Co+op Grocers (NCG) in the USA, and Santosh Shukla, Deputy General Manager of IFFCO (India), all of them examples of cooperatives offering a wide range of benefits to their members (savings, economies of scale, financing facilities, more favorable prices, etc.).
In her thematic analysis, Paola Delvecchio, a researcher at Euricse, pointed out that, as the research shows, large cooperatives and mutuals explicitly convey their cooperative or mutual identity to a greater or lesser extent. “Through this project, we are disseminating information to mobilize,” she noted.
For his part, Gianluca Salvatori, Secretary-General of Euricse, called on cooperatives around the world to “fully accept” the importance of generating quality data. “We need an ambitious program to spread the data culture within the cooperative world,” he stated.
Salvatori encouraged cooperatives to seize the opportunity brought by the UN in proclaiming 2025 as an International Year of Cooperatives to assert their role in the knowledge and data economy.
The full webinar recording is available here.
Check out the 2023 WCM here!
