The concepts of bioeconomy development require the integration of different sectors and economic activities. Bioeconomy helps to achieve the goals of sustainable development. This paper provides an overview of the cooperation for the need of bioeconomy development, examining it from agricultural cooperatives development, theoretical concept and European countries policy and Kazakhstan perspective. The research methods are induction and deduction, monographic, the group interview, statistical data analysis and synthesis, descriptive, matching and comparison and other methods. The cooperation passes through several levels of development – information, consultation, joint action, collective decision-making. The cooperation within farmers (horizontal cooperation) is so far narrow and limited to traditional cooperatives that bring together producers of the same product. New forms of cooperation and more diverse directions in national, regional and local levels are needed to develop the bioeconomy. Partnerships, the interdepartmental and interdisciplinary cooperation based on knowledge and innovation should be established between farmers, agri-food companies and scientific institutions, Kazakhstan and other countries universities. The agricultural and rural development advisory system should be improved, and new measures to promote communication, counselling and cooperation should be introduced.

Cooperation and financial stability of agricultural companies, especially small and medium ones, is very significant for the development of agricultural sector. In Latvia, cooperatives represent different sizes and industries: dairy, grain, fruit and vegetable, forest, agricultural services and home production. The research aim is to assess financial distress in agricultural cooperatives in Latvia by applying the prevention system indicators. The evaluation of financial indicators is based on the methodology developed by Deutscher Raiffeisenverband e.V. (DRV) – the leading association of agricultural and food industry cooperatives and cooperative-oriented companies in Germany. This system prescribes reporting and monitoring requirements for cooperatives to perform the preventive case analysis to ensure a successful operation of a cooperative or to prevent financial problems, if any. Therefore, financial indicators of cooperatives in Latvia were analysed adapting the DRV analysis methodology to the situation of Latvia to identify cooperatives requiring support to ensure viability. The evaluation of cooperatives by the number of employees, assets, sales and other financial indicators convincingly demonstrates that the largest and most financially strong cooperatives in Latvia operate in the grain sector, followed by the dairy sector. The assessment of financial distress reports that 10 out of 51 analysed cooperatives experience risk of operation. The most common threat to a cooperative in Latvia is related to its equity; however, it is recommended to evaluate this indicator in line with other indicators, for example, changes in equity in recent years and length of a cooperative’s operation.