20-21 September 2017, Bangkok, Thailand

The traditional cooperative only works for one single stakeholders’ group. In Hansalim we are working together with different stakeholders, farmers and consumers. We can say, we are multi-stakeholders cooperative. And besides consumers and producers there are staff who actually work in Hansalim. And these workers are consisted of consumer activists who used to be consumers members and the general who get paid for their work. And these types of different labors are working together in well-balanced situation.

Social enterprise is more important but I want to say that do not forget the purpose of being association as a social economy enterprise. And Hansalim is a national organization. We are our business covering whole country. We also respect our local autonomy. By the end of 2016 our consumer members are 586,000 households.This is made of South Korea and we have 23 consumers cooperative of Hansalim revitalization. And we are handling about 2,000 varieties of products. And those products are not just the food but also the life supplies.

There are 2 ways of distributing our products, one is through the home delivery service,another one is letting our consumer member to visit the store and buy things by themselves. Our stores are 217 by end of 2017 May. And now we have 2,150 farmers by end of 2016.

he value of cooperative is always important to think what we are doing. Since Hansalim is issued by now, every local person, cooperative and the other organization are selecting their own representative and that representative are consisting the general assembly of federation. This is one of the most important event related to decision making. All the representative of the farmer and consumer gather together and they fix the amount of rice and even the price of the rice before they make the actual production. Whenever the amount of rice production has been fixed through these meetings, consumer member has responsibility to consume it all. Now we are having newly harvested rice from this week and the price was already fixed at last December. Not only the rice also other products of Hansalim are fixed in amount and price by consumer and farmer together. And this is the other important Hansalim theme of consumer activity.

Hansalim has been starting from food and now we expand it into many variety of issue, so consumer members are not only consumer members but they are activists. The consumer members came to be the member for their individual reason, but after they buy Hansalim products they became activists who are in the chain of social issue, I think this is very important.