Agricultural Production Cooperatives (APCs) being in deep crisis adjusted to the hard conditions of market economy. Within the whole analysed period the process of continuous decline in the number of cooperatives could be observed, along with the decrease of the area of agricultural land utilised by these cooperatives, and – mostly – employed members of these cooperatives. Smaller, economically weaker cooperatives were the ones to be liquidated most often. Such a wide scale of the decrease in the number of cooperatives is an effect not only of external conditions, but also of the crisis of cooperative forms of management and crisis of the cooperative membership. In the conditions of growing competition mainly bigger, economically stronger cooperatives remained on the market – those which were well managed and which could carry out restructuring and modernisation. At the threshold of Poland's accession to the European Union, vast majority of cooperatives (APCs in particular) was well prepared for competing not only at the domestic, but also at the Community common agricultural market. But still almost 25% of APCs remained economically weak and their perspectives of maintaining on the difficult agricultural market remained bleak.