ICA-AP Committee on Consumer Cooperation held its 57th meeting followed by the collaboration seminar with Consumer Cooperative Worldwide (CCW) on 7 November in Manila Philippines, in conjunction with the 16th ICA-AP Regional Assembly.

It was the first on-site committee meeting in the last 4 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was attended by 20 participants (including 7 committee members) from 7 countries.  Mr. Yamakoshi Akihiro, the chair of the committee opened the meeting and welcomed Prof. Petar Stefanov, the president of CCW.

Prof. Stefanov thanked the ICA-AP Consumer Committee for inviting delegates from CCW to the meeting and for organizing the collaborativw seminar. He hoped that they could cooperate to develop consumer cooperative movements around the world.

In the meeting, Ms. Itsumi Hishinuma, committee secretary presented the activity and financial reports for 2023 and the activity plan and budget for 2024. She mentioned that in 2023, the committee could hold a webinar, training program in Japan, regional workshop in South Korea, on-site meeting and a collaboration seminar with CCW. The training programs and workshops were organized every year from 1991 and 2000 to 2019 respectively but stopped amid the pandemic. She was pleased that the committee could resume these events again in 2023 and thanked the host organizations for holding the events again. There were two participants in the meeting who attended the training program in Japan and shared their experiences. For the next year, the committee will hold at least 3 events including a regional workshop in Vietnam, a training program in Japan and the 58th committee meeting. These reports and proposals were unanimously agreed upon by members attending the meeting.

Collaboration seminar between the ICA-AP Consumer Committee and CCW:

After the meeting, the collaboration seminar between the ICA-AP Consumer Committee and CCW was held. CCW is a sectoral organization of the International Cooperative Alliance for consumer cooperatives. It was a valuable opportunity for the two committees to explain their activities to each other and share ideas on how to collaborate and  accelerate cooperative movement in the world together.

Following the opening remarks from Prof. Stefanov, Mr. Yamakoshi presented the overview of the ICA-AP Consumer Committee. He explained that the committee was established in 1977 to help promote consumer coop activities in the Asia Pacific region. Currently, the committee is composed of 17 organizations from 12 countries. It has been financially supported by JCCU and other member organizations which host and organize events as committee activities. The committee’s main activities are the Training Program in Japan, Regional Workshops, seminars on specific topics such as HR development, webinars, publication, research and annual meetings. The committee has been one of the most active committees in the Asia Pacific for a long time.

Mr. Todor Ivanov, CCW secretary presented the overview of CCW. Currently, CCW is composed of 17 member organizations in Europe, 4 in Asia-Pacific, 5 in the Americas and 1 in Africa. Some members also join the ICA-AP Consumer Committee. As missions, it initiates and facilitates the strategic development of consumer co-operatives and promotes active communications and information sharing with all members and ICA. One of its interesting activities is the 2022 International Children’s COOP Competition to promote cooperative identity and consumer cooperative culture. Children aged 5 to 18 painted a drawing with a co-op mark and these paintings are exhibited in Brussels. There are also members’ collaborations in co-op digitalization, store formats, private labels and food sustainability policy. CCW has now started the Coop2Coop e-commerce platform as a pilot project.

After learning about the two organizations, participants watched the short video of the CCW’s Coop2Coop e-commerce platform. Cooperative producers, wholesalers, and retailers come together on the platform to showcase their products and they can also find products they need. If they find products attractive, then they can directly chat with each other on the platform to get further information and start a transaction.

The participants discussed how the ICA-AP Consumer Committee and CCW can work together to accelerate the consumer cooperative movement around the world. They also talked about the e-commerce platform. Mr. Ivanov said that he would like cooperatives in the Asia and Pacific region to also join the platform so that it can accelerate Cooperation among cooperatives even in the business area. Even though it just started and is in the testing stage, if they join, try and share ideas of how to improve the platform and how to overcome the challenges, in the long-term platform would be much more efficient and even attract more users.

At the end of the seminar, the chair and the president of the two committees gave closing remarks and messages and hoped for their further collaboration.