Francesconi, Gian Nicola and Fleur Wouterse (2011).International Food Policy Research Institute Discussion Paper 01129, October.

This study examines why many Ghanaian farmers' organizations have failed to effectively mobilize, concluding that membership structures and rules of conduct are important determinants of organizational effectiveness.

Theory on farmers' collectives dates back to Michael Oakeshott's 1978 book on The Case for Workers' Cooperatives, written following his extended field study in Africa.  Oakeshott promoted a view of workers as stakeholders yet acknowledged that cooperatives were difficult to create and sustain.  Most importantly, Oakeshott “suggested that strong emphasis must be put on conditions necessary for cooperative success and that the single most important condition is that of good leadership” (1-2).

More recent studies of farmers' collectives in Africa have found mixed results.  The World Bank reports that “their overall performance remains highly contested”, while other scholars note that “it is often unclear what these organizations actually do in terms of collective activities, as many of them appear to be dormant, much like empty shells” (2).  Mobilizational failure of farmers' organizations has been attributed to collective action problems including shirking and intra-organizational conflicts.  As a result of this debate, there have been calls to open the black boxes of farmers' organizations in order to develop diverse and selective support strategies.

In this paper, Francesconi and Wouterse heed that call with a study of primary data on 500 Ghanian farmers' organizations.  They find that “environments characterized by a functioning market, basic infrastructure, and critical mass (in terms of population size) are important pre-existing conditions for collective action.  Yet, this study shows that there is no one direct intervention that can universally promote collective action.  This is because collective action can be constrained by additional problems, with some FBOs [farmer-based organizations] facing internal issues of cohesion and others confronting access barriers to markets.  Both problems are associated with poor leadership, defined by the lack of either motivation or capacity to keep organizational structure and conduct well aligned.  While cohesion problems require the facilitation and coordination of participatory appraisals and learning within an FBO; access problems call for leaders to grant additional economic incentives as well as decisional authority and autonomy”  (2).

Ghanaian agriculture was characterized by state-controlled cooperatives as late as the 1980s.  State cooperatives disintegrated with structural reforms, liberalization, and privatization in the late 1980s and 1990s.  Since the early 2000s, rural cooperatives known as farmer-based organizations have become popular.  Though they maintain some cooperative traditions such as democratic voting, they have been renamed so as to indicate a break with the centralized model of the past.  In 2010, there were at least 10,000 organizations operating in rural Ghana.  The authors attribute the rapid rise of these organizations to “nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, and private investors who increasingly see rural collectives as key partners to achieve agribusiness development and governance decentralization objectives” (3).  The World Bank authorized US$9 million for support of Ghanaian farmer-based organizations over 2000-2007.  These organizations have been delineated along production, processing, marketing, and multipurpose activities; gender; and ethnic or religious affinity.  Ghana's Millennium Development Authority requires farmer-based organizations to include at least 50 members, attend business training sessions, register with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, open a collective bank account, and develop bylaws and bookkeeping before they can participate in the Millennium Challenge Account Program.

The authors collected data in the field at the group and individual level with digital questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, and games designed to test cooperation.  The average farmer-based organization in the sample has 38 members, is seven years old, and is located in a small village located 12 miles away from the nearest Ministry of Food and Agriculture office.  The Eastern and Volta regions are best represented in the sample, and only 34% of organizations in the sample operate in districts where land can be bought and sold.  Only 38% of organizations had mobilized successful collective action in the past, defined as member contributions to a common cause.

The authors classify organizations into four groups: those with efficiency-based conduct and homogeneous structure, those with equity-based conduct and homogeneous structure, those with efficiency-based conduct and homogeneous structure, and those with equity-based conduct and heterogeneous structure.  The authors argue that only the second and third groups will be active.  The first typology creates cohesion problems while the fourth typology leads to free riding and disincentives to invest.  The fourth typology is very common in Ghana, explaining some of the undermobilization of farmers' organizations.

The study concludes on a pessimistic note, arguing that “the message emerging from this study is that the optimism of will, arising from the UN's declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, needs to be qualified by some pessimism of intellect” (15).  Currently, many Ghanaian farmer-based organizations are “small, newly established, and failing to mobilize any sort of collective action” (15).  Most organizations face market access problems due to conflicts of interest between members, while a smaller number suffer from shirking among members.  In light of this finding, Ghana's policy targeting problems of cohesion is inappropriate.  The authors suggest that “To address the much more common problem of access policymakers ought to diversify their support for collective action by granting more economic incentives, authority, and autonomy to local leaders (that is, allow for some degree of elite capture) to reactivate existing FBOs characterized by heterogeneous membership structure and equity- based conduct. By doing so, Ghanaian FBOs are expected to gain competitiveness in the marketplace, which is essential for their sustainable development over time” (15).