Improving Institutional Capacity:
Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries
26
situation which was more common in the past, especially in cash crops in post-colonial Africa,
for example), and thus can exert a significant amount of power over the agricultural sector.
Even more so than with apex farmer organization bodies, understanding the control of
marketing boards is important. Boards which are controlled by the government – especially
when their mandate makes them the sole buyer of produce – can create significant power
imbalances and weaken the ability of farmer organizations to improve the livelihoods of their
members. This situation can arise not only when governments use marketing boards as easy
sources of revenue for central budgets (for example, in boards focused on export cash crops)
but even in the case of staple crops, when government boards may purposefully push down
the price paid to farmers in order to provide lower-cost produce to politically-important urban
consumers. An example of the impact of central control of marketing boards can be found in
Uganda in the coffee sector (the most important cash crop). As shown in in the era
when coffee marketing was controlled by a government body, farmers received only 20-40%
of the final export price. As soon as government control was abolished, farmers immediately
received upwards of 70% of the export price.
Figure 7: Share of coffee export price received by Ugandan farmers33
Thus, understanding whether a marketing board exists and who controls it is an important
component of analysing the challenges that farmer organizations may face and formulating a
plan to engage with FOs. This study examines marketing arrangements for the highest-value
crop in each of the OIC member countries. In total, data was available for 39 countries in the
set, and of those, 17 countries (44%) had independent marketing boards, nearly all of
whose mandate is primarily in sector promotion, rather than the control of buying and
selling34. Meanwhile 14 countries (36%) had government-run marketing boards. A further
2 had semi-autonomous boards or a combination of a private and a government marketing
33 Adapted from Baffes, John, “Restructuring Uganda’s Coffee Industry: Why Going Back to the Basics Matters”, World Bank
Policy Research Working Paper 4020, October 2006
34 There are some exceptions, for example in Oman and Saudi Arabia private marketing boards with more control over
buying from primary producers were observed.
Post
Liberalization