Shri Binod Anand, Secretary General of CNRI and Founder & Executive President of WCOOPEF, participates in the United Nations General Assembly deliberations on the Right to Development.
New York [New York], September 26: Shri Binod Anand, Secretary General of the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) and Founder & Executive President of the World Cooperative Economic Forum (WCOOPEF), took part in the United Nations General Assembly deliberations on the Right to Development. He also held a series of high-level meetings on geopolitics and the global economy, including with senior management of UN DESA.
Throughout these engagements, Shri Anand presented India’s vision of “Sahkar Se Samriddhi” (Prosperity through Cooperation) as a practical, people-centred solution to four linked global challenges: Food, Fertiliser, Fuel and Finance. He argued that geopolitical tensions are now disrupting supply chains, raising input costs and tightening credit for the Global South. In that setting, cooperatives serve as resilient, community-owned infrastructure that keeps value, data and decision-making in the hands of producers.
At the centre of his interventions was CNRI’s Cooperative Economic Framework (CEF). The framework treats cooperatives as more than welfare institutions. It sees them as strategic economic architecture: transparent local markets, member-owned finance, and farmer-controlled supply chains that strengthen economic sovereignty and shrink the space for exploitation, market capture and financial crime. His discussions covered the whole value chain, from farming, dairy, fisheries and fertiliser access to rural credit, cooperative insurance, and green energy such as compressed biogas and circular bio-economy models.
“The world’s crises of food, fertiliser, fuel and finance are no longer separate problems. They are one geoeconomic chain, and whoever controls that chain controls the fate of billions of small producers,” said Shri Binod Anand. “Our Cooperative Economic Framework offers a different answer: when farmers own the chain, from seed and soil to credit and clean energy, supply shocks become shared burdens instead of private windfalls, and development becomes a right exercised rather than a promise awaited.”
“As we mark forty years of the Declaration on the Right to Development, the question before the United Nations is not whether the Global South needs growth, but who will own it,” he added. “Sahkar Se Samriddhi turns people from beneficiaries into stakeholders. That is the cooperative firewall the world needs against market concentration, financial exclusion and economic coercion.”
In his meetings with UN DESA, Shri Anand proposed a strategic collaboration on “Cooperatives as Infrastructure for Inclusive, Digital and Sustainable Development.” It includes a Global South Cooperative Policy Lab, a Cooperatives & VNRs Toolkit, a UN–Global South Cooperative Development Dialogue, and a Coop-Eco Digital & AI Literacy Mission, with a 12-month pilot proposed.
CNRI holds Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and has been an Affiliate Member of the OECD International Network on Financial Education (OECD/INFE) since 2011.
WCOOPEF is a global not-for-profit platform dedicated to advancing cooperative economics worldwide.
The Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) is a national network of rural civil-society organisations working on agriculture, cooperation, financial inclusion and rural livelihoods, and it holds ECOSOC Special Consultative Status.
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