IFFCO Chairman N P Patel has lost election to the Board of ICA held on Monday in Cape Town. The election took place while the General Assembly of International Cooperative Alliance is in progress in South Africa.
The details of what caused Mr Patel to lose are awaited.
Mr Patel, a veteran cooperator from Gujarat was expecting an easy walk-over after the infighting among Indian cooperators ended and he was declared to be the consensus candidate. But such elections require global mobilization as voters are not limited to a country.
Though IFFCO alone had 14 votes, obviously it was not enough.
The experience also proves that once you have acquired a position on the International forum, you cannot take it for 
granted. One requires close interaction and intense lobbying to maintain that.
IFFCO had earlier represented the Board from India through its late Chairman Surender Jakhar who was a high-profile cooperator and son of the former Union Agriculture Minister Balram Jakhar.
Experts point out that IFFCO’s loss is more an ICA loss than vice-versa. IFFCO figured in the list of top 300 cooperatives prepared by ICA. The President Dame Pauline lost no occasion to show-case IFFCO. Her visit to one of the IFFCO’s plants during a visit to India earlier inspired her to write an animated blog on the success of the cooperative movement.
ICA would indeed be poorer by denying a chance to the representative of a country where the cooperative movement is the strongest, said an expert.
General Assembly’s focus is adopting cooperative blueprint for the cooperative decade. ICA members from different countries have gathered for the occasion.
