Introduction: Collective action in agriculture
回顾了农业集体行动在政策与研究层面的新关注，介绍了生产者组织（POs）在欧盟果蔬部门的演变与作用，适合研究农业合作社、集体行动或欧盟共同农业政策的学者快速了解背景。
There is a renewed interest in collective action in agriculture, both at the policy and research level. Groups of agricultural producers, small and large, form to make joint investments in processing and marketing facilities, to share a collective reputation, to bargain with supplying, processing and retailing firms, to gain access to distant and/or foreign markets, to spread costs of extension services, to name a few examples. These groups are common in many countries, even though they are known with different names, such as agricultural cooperatives, producer organisations (POs), producer-owned enterprises, member-owned firms and so on. In the EU, agricultural cooperatives are very common but other examples of collective action are gaining importance. POs, for instance, have been recognised and empowered in the fruit and vegetables (F&V) sector since the 1970s. Compared with cooperatives, in their bylaws POs are more flexible organisations by design, with the major requirement that they have to serve members and be controlled by them. With the MacSharry reform of 1996, POs have been used by the EU as a vehicle to support the F&V sector. More precisely, as emphasised with the reform of 2007, their role is ‘to strengthen the position of producers in the face of a greater concentration of demand and to integrate environmental concerns in the production and marketing of F&V. For the first time, POs could receive EU support in the form of a contribution to the operational funds needed to implement operational programmes’ (European Commission, 2014: 3).