Lindiwe Kunene

Sustainable agricultural system contextualizes cooperative practices to reflect competitive economic returns, the continuous supply of essential and life-supporting ecosystem services, and enhanced food security. The study seeks to establish the challenges of small scale farmers in transforming into mainstream sustainable commercial farming and accessing competitive markets through greener economic functionality of the agricultural cooperative. To address these challenging phases and gaps towards growth prospects, this paper provides a comprehensive literature review and phenomenological approach on the underlying paradigm of personal knowledge and subjectivity. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to assess the extent of sustainable socio-economic network influence of Sicabazini farming cooperative on the potential shift in the living standard, and to examine the antecedent economics of environmental farming cooperative challenges to traverse the growth prospects with the context of cooperative social capital networks. The paper adopted the qualitative paradigm using interviews as data collection instrument on fifty participants from Sicabazini farming cooperative. In providing richer understanding and more insightful and inductive discussions on the phenomena, the rigorous application of case study content analysis reveals credibility assurance that the role of the sustainable farming cooperative benefits the economics of dual objectivity (social and economic nature) while simultaneously elevating environment of agricultural prosperity and creating sustainable job opportunities in remote rural areas. Furthermore, to transferability value of this study, the lack of resources and less accessible larger markets coupled by languishing commercial growth prospects influence the progressive phases of environmental cooperative.

Keywords: cooperatives, sustainable farming, social capital, stakeholder theory.
JEL Classification: Q13, Q56, Q58