(Farmer) Producer Companies in India as new generation cooperatives: Case studies of performance and impact from West Bengal, India

Abstract

One of the innovative alternatives to the traditional cooperative structure has been the new generation cooperatives or cooperative companies, known as producer companies (PCs) in India since the early 2000s. This paper examines the impact of PCs on the member farmer livelihoods, which is not well studied, with the help of member and non-member farmer interview survey in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is found that though the PCs were inclusive of small farmers in their membership, the PC interface with members for farm inputs was not very strong and the output linkage was poor, reaching only a small proportion of member farmers.The Sufal Bangla public supermarket franchise by some PCs was found to make a large difference to the PC performance and its impact on member farmers. The small size of membership in most case study PCs hindered the equity size, leading to working capital and market interface constraints. Therefore, it is important to encourage members to contribute more equity and to reward their output linkage.

Gender and Producer Organisations: Case Studies of Performance and Impact of All-Women Member PCs in Central India

“…There are 4,530 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) operational in the state. The state has been also a pioneer in the setting up of new form of cooperatives-PCs-since 2005 (Singh and Singh, 2014). The state was also the first to set up a state level PC as a consortium of PCs which had 90 members (Rani et al, 2018).…”

“…Realising that this was not very empowering for women in such entities, as it was more a by-product of mainstreaming gender narrative in development circles, women only PCs were established at many places along the lines of all women milk co-operatives promoted by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in many parts of India given that dairying is mostly women's work. Its subsidiary (National Dairy Services) has also later promoted five milk producers' companies under the Companies Act, 2003 including one all-women member PC which are at the state level and one of the largest size PCs in India in terms of equity capital, membership and turnover (Singh, 2021a). Across India, women-only member PCs accounted for only 2.4 per cent of the total in 2021.…”

“…There are not many serious analytical studies on the performance and impact of all-women PCs in India unlike PCs in general (for details see Singh, 2021a). Among a few small assessments in local contexts, in case of silk, MASUTA women producer's company led to members receiving 75 per cent of consumer price, leading to empowerment of women as well as financially weaker sections of the society besides promoting gender equity (Gupta, 2015).…”

“…It gives more freedom to co-operatives as companies to operate as business entities in a competitive market (Trebbin and Hassler, 2012). PCs are also seen as an institutional innovation in the domain of farmer aggregation and agricultural marketing channels (Bhanot et al, 2021;Singh, 2021b) (For details of PC features and structure and their departure from or similarity with co-operatives, see Singh and Singh, 2014).…”