Cooperative forms of collective action have a strong presence in agriculture worldwide, processing and/or commercializing one-half of the world’s food at some given stage of the value chain. In Morocco alone, there are about 10 000 registered cooperatives acting in the agriculture sector. The formal registration of such a large number of cooperatives1 has been, above all, the result of a number of policies whose effect and impacts on the sector and on the performance of cooperatives have not yet been thoroughly studied. This study aims to provide a better understanding of how cooperatives can contribute to the development of the agriculture sector and rural areas in Morocco and what policy changes and areas of investment could be considered to better enable this.