Cooperative patronage: The National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi in Kasungu District

Abstract

This paper estimates the determinants of farmers' decisions to join a rural producer organisation, the National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi (NASFAM), in Kasungu District. Data for the study were collected in June and August 2003 using household-level questionnaires and stratified random sampling, where strata were membership status and gender. Probit analysis of 250 farmers shows that off-farm sources of income, distance of the farmer's household from Kasungu District centre, age of the farmer, tobacco farming, education, household level land holding and gender determined the decision to join NASFAM. These results suggest that farmers should be informed of the potential benefits of participating in rural development efforts, and that rural communication and information infrastructure should be improved so as to reduce the costs of information access and transactions in general, if participation in organisations such as NASFAM is to be enhanced.probit analysis, farmers' cooperatives, NASFAM membership, Malawi,

Interrogating the Effectiveness of Farmer Producer Organisations in Enhancing Smallholder Commercialisation – Frontline Experiences From Central Malawi

“…Vendors, who are synonymous with offering low exploitative prices to farmers, remain the main buyers of produce from both FPOs and their members. This is one of the main reasons contributing to high member turnovers in FPOs in central Malawi as the incentive for farmers to maintain their membership is very low, a view also corroborated in previous studies (Matchaya, 2010;Matchaya and Peroton, 2013).…”

Factors Affecting the Participation of Sugarcane and Tobacco Farmers in Farmer Groups, Associations and Cooperatives in Indonesia

“…Smith (2013) states that farmer association in Malawi facilitates market access and provision of financial capital. In line with that, Matchaya (2010) has uncovered that farmer associations can provide access to credit and market access. Furthermore, in apple farming in China, farming cooperatives become a collective means of reducing agricultural risk (Jin et al, 2020).…”

“…As a consequence, poor farmers are more likely to participate in associations. For example, farmers in Malawi join associations to obtain market access and price guarantee (Matchaya, 2010;Smith, 2013). In contrast, farmer wealth has no significant effect on participation in farmer groups because the farmer group is a government-promoted organization, which aims to be inclusive to all farmers regardless of their wealth.…”

Achieving Sustainable Development Goals in the global food sector: A systematic literature review to examine small farmers engagement in contract farming

“…Second, the literature review identifies land ownership structures as being important for smallholder participation in agricultural interventions. However, in the context of contract farming, the question of how different land tenure arrangements may favor or impede smallholder participation in contract farming remains unexplored particularly in the context of private versus communal land ownership, formal versus customary land ownership, fixed-term land leasing, and in cases where land transfer is based on matrilineal rules versus patrilineal rules (Matchaya, 2010). In other words, an examination of how the politics of land influences the performance of contract farming programs is of critical necessity.…”