Improving Institutional Capacity:
Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries
5
Introduction
Agriculture is an important contributor to national economic growth in the member states of
the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). In total, approximately 54% of the OIC
population lives in rural areas; many engage in agricultural livelihoods, contributing to
national food security and broad-based income generation6. Given agriculture’s prominent
economic role, understanding how the industry is organized is an important step in
formulating effective policy. Most agricultural industries in emerging economies include
farmer organizations (FOs), which can enable farmers to realize economic benefits that they
would not otherwise achieve alone.
The benefits of well-functioning FOs are numerous in terms of productivity and livelihoods
improvements through access to various inputs, services, and markets. Farmer organizations
are active all along the agricultural value chain from input supply to processing and value-
addition. At each stage, well-functioning FOs can provide benefits for their members: In the
input stage, FOs can allow farmers to access improved inputs like seed on better financial
terms, and sometimes provide credit to allow greater use of inputs. In the trading and
wholesale stage, FOs can aggregate their members’ produce to reduce transaction costs and
gain better prices, and also allow their members to access new types of buyers who may offer
higher prices. Finally, in the downstream stages (e.g. processing), FOs can allow farmers to
capture more of the final value of an agricultural product, for example by investing in collective
facilities to do primary processing – which in turn allows the farmers’ goods to be sold at
higher prices and margins.
Further examples of how FOs can improve the livelihoods of small-scale farmers are discussed
in detail in this report.
However, given that low farmer organization membership rates can potentially create adverse
effects on member countries’ agricultural productivity, a study has been conducted to
understand the current strength of farmer organizations within the OIC and to develop
recommendations for continuing to strengthen them. This study is informed by a literature
review of successful institutional approaches, cross-country data-gathering, and in-country
case studies of OIC farmer organizations.
For the cross-country data-gathering, the research focused on publicly-available policy
documents published by the relevant ministries in each country, news reports on government
programs and policies, and reports and publications of international agricultural and
cooperative development bodies. Research was conducted in English, French, and Arabic using
a standardized 9-question template involving both qualitative and quantitative data (the
questions are given over the course of Section 2). A total of 51 out of 57 OIC member countries
were covered by this desk research7 .
For the in-country case studies, four countries (Senegal, Morocco, Uganda, and Indonesia)
were visited, resulting in in-depth profiles of five farmer organizations. Assessment of these
organizations was done through a standardized tool (given in full in Annex 2) based a number
6 COMCEC Coordination Office, “Improving Institutional Capacity: Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member
Countries”, Project TOR. Based on latest available statistics (2011).
7
Albania, Brunei Darussalam, Iran, Krygyz Republic, and Turkmenistan were not covered due to lack of documents in the
three research languages, and Indonesia was primarily covered only through the field visits, so it is also not counted in the
51 countries mentioned.