Co-Locating the Processing of Agricultural Products

Abstract

Determination and identification of areas with economic potential, particularly in the production and processing of agricultural products and targeted investments in rural, urban and regional planning, is one of the important issues and it has a critical role in increasing employment, income, rural productivity and improve livelihood of this country. In this context, the aim of this study is to establish priority locations for processing agricultural cooperatives in rural areas of the West provinces (i.e. Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Ilam, Lorestan and Hamedan) by using TOPSIS. For this purpose, the availability of raw materials were selected as one of the most important factors affecting the establishment of cooperatives in rural areas of the West of the Country, and it was used to determine the weights while studying the literature by using the snowball sampling method. For this purpose, eleven instructor and experts from the industries in charge of agricultural products processing were selected and their comments were used. The results showed that based on the availability of raw materials to industries, rural areas of Kermanshah and Hamadan had the highest level of TOPSIS method based cooperatives and the rural areas in the provinces of Lorestan, Kurdistan, and Ilam was ranked third to the fifth.

Keywords

• Rural Development
• Agricultural processing cooperatives
• locating