Measuring the Benefits of Smallholder Farmer Membership in Producer‐Controlled Vertical Value Chains: Survey Findings From a Development Project in East Africa

David John O'Brien, Lloyd Banwart and Michael L. Cook

Poverty & Public Policy, 2013, vol. 5, issue 4, 399-416

Abstract: The question addressed in this article is what precisely are the benefits that small‐scale farmers in the developing world receive from being members of producer‐controlled vertical value chains? A baseline comparative survey was conducted of members and non‐members of four vertically coordinated dairy cooperatives, three in Kenya and one in Uganda (N = 3,986), which are part of a larger five‐year longitudinal cooperative study. The study measures both objective income gains and subjective satisfaction gains from cooperative membership. Cooperative members have a small but statistically significant advantage over non‐members in income from dairy, but other incentives for membership are based on selective incentives (i.e., provision of non‐income services to members) and social capital (i.e., trust that the cooperative will purchase their milk and pay them a fair price). These findings suggest that the motivations for cooperative membership in developing countries are not dissimilar from motivations of cooperative members in more developed countries. This coupled with similar organizational design issues suggests that greater attention should be paid to larger‐scale vertically coordinated collective action models in development theory and research.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/pop4.50

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:povpop:v:5:y:2013:i:4:p:399-416

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Poverty & Public Policy from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().