The role of regional vintners’ cooperatives in the development of rural areas in Germany

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is the question, as regards the concept of endogenous development in recent years, as to how far recent policies of the regional wine cooperatives in Germany have influenced the economic, social, mental and landscape structures of the regions under their regime. Wine cooperatives are an especially suitable example to clarify this question because they must use the spatial potential of their regions to the optimum as hardly any other agrarian self‐help organization needs to. The first section offers a survey of the total development of the current structures of the German viticulture cooperatives and explains their present importance for the German wine market. On 35 000 ha of vineyards, about 70 000 members produces roughly a third of all German wine. In a regional survey of this picture the proportions change because in some wine regions the cooperatives produce only a marginal share. They can only develop a sustained spatial influence in the former equal‐inheritance, small‐plot areas of south‐western Germany where they sometimes market more than 70% of the regional wine production. In such areas, they were the rescuers of German viticulture after World War II and are now the motor in modern wine‐processing and marketing. In another section the Gebeitswinz‐ergenossenschqft Franken is used to exemplify the spatial effects of a cooperative's policy. Without concealing the structural problems of a large‐scale cooperative in a market system there remains, nevertheless, a positive balance of spatial effects with regard to endogenous planning concept. Thanks to better incomes from viticulture, emigration from rural areas has been halted and building substance improved, thus bringing a higher standard of living to the villagers involved.