Improving Institutional Capacity:
Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries
18
Has the government announced any recent policy initiatives explicitly designed to
encourage FOs?
Many governments have taken steps to directly encourage or strengthen farmer organizations
in recent years, and to guide the development of farmer organizations that adhere to the
fundamental principles of good governance discussed in Section 4.3.1. Examples of such
policies and actions could include:
 New government bodies set up to work directly with FOs
 New laws passed encouraging agricultural lending to / through FOs
 New laws aimed at improving the governance of FOs, e.g. requiring more participatory
structures or requiring a greater role for women
While the policies and actions taken will vary significantly according to country context (and
are thus not particularly amenable to summarization), some highlights of OIC member actions
and general observations are presented below. A select set of policy actions from OIC member
countries across the three groups are then discussed in significantly more detail in Section
which follows this section.
Many interesting themes emerged from the review of policies and approaches recently enacted
by OIC member countries but for simplicity, examples are grouped below by region. First, in
North African and Central Asian countries, this study uncovered evidence of renewed focus on
farmer organizations and co-ops in general in countries, sometimes related to some type of
government or societal transition. In some cases, the policies were aimed at strengthening
cooperation between FOs and governments and in other cases, the FO promotion efforts were
part of broader rural development agendas designed to strengthen livelihoods. Examples of
such policy efforts include:
 In Egypt, the new constitution prohibits the dissolution of cooperatives or their boards,
except by virtue of a court judgment, and mandates greater representation of small-scale
farmers on the boards of agricultural cooperatives. In recent years, a long-time ban on the
independent Union of Egyptian Farmers was also lifted.
 In Tunisia, there has been recent focus on legal reforms, as the new government has
sought to restructure the legal framework in which FOs operate, create 24 new FOs, and
encourage involvement in FOs. This is a marked break from past efforts to discourage the
creation of FOs and even to actively shut down FOs.
 In Libya, the government and the FAO have recently developed a joint $71m program to
increase food production, which will target farmer organizations.
 In Palestine, the cooperative model has long been seen as a means of survival in all
sectors including agricultural production, and thus authorities have historically strived to
empower cooperatives in general and FOs in particular. An example of this is a new
cooperatives law adopted and promoted in 2009 by the government, which emphasized
making regulations as loose as possible for cooperatives to be easily created.
 In Afghanistan, the government has encouraged the creation of cooperatives, with the
2008-2013 Master Plan setting a target of 5,000 new cooperatives, who are eligible to
receive free or subsidized inputs. The government is also cooperating with the World Bank
on several projects involving farmer organizations in horticulture and livestock.
The second theme of note is in the Gulf region and Arab Group states where agriculture is not a
significant part of the economy, where governments have encouraged FOs as part of
economic diversification and food self-sufficiency initiatives. Climate resilience concerns –
water scarcity and protection from increasingly severe natural disasters – are often part of
these efforts. Examples of this include: