Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management: concepts and experiences

6.1
HARNESSING THE POWER OF FOs FOR PRO-POOR DEVELOPMENT
FOs have the potential to provide many technical, economic and social benefits to 
small-scale aquaculture farmers in developing countries, as shown by the preceding case 
studies. However, as mentioned above, they may not be the most appropriate strategy 
for poor and subsistence farmers who lack the resources to enable them to produce a 
reliable surplus for market. FOs are often established by better-off producers (which 
was the case for all of the FO case studies undertaken in Thailand), and membership 
requirements and cultural norms may exclude poorer farmers, women and other 
marginalized groups. Often, the poorest small-scale producers live in deprived and 
remote areas and face thin markets, resulting in a lack of successful FOs in the area for 

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Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management – Concepts and experiences
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farmers to join. In these cases, where more fundamental and structural changes have 
to be made, FOs will find it difficult to succeed and may not be the most appropriate 
response, especially when poor subsistence farmers who lack critical technical and 
entrepreneurial capacities are the targets of development intervention. This may not 
always be the case and can depend on the context and types of constraints that farmers 
face and the type of support they receive. If interventions are focused on empowerment 
of these groups and are managed carefully, perhaps by starting smaller groups to 
address specific constraints that can then grow steadily to become formal FOs over 
time, poor and marginalized groups can still benefit in the future. However, enabling 
these groups to benefit from commercially oriented FOs still remains a challenge and 
will need to be carefully addressed through targeting and tailoring of interventions to 
meet the needs of these groups.
However, in contexts where there are minimum levels of market development 
with growth prospects, where there are small-scale farmers that have the potential 
to produce some surplus for the market and where there is a suitable institutional 
and enabling environment, FOs can be an effective way of contributing to poverty 
alleviation through a wide range of direct benefits for members (e.g. increased access to 
input and output markets and services, increased bargaining power, lower costs due to 
economies of scale, and increased voice and empowerment). Support organizations can 
maximize these direct benefits by encouraging poorer farmers and other marginalized 
groups to join FOs and providing them with more targeted capacity building, training 
and support to enable them to realize their potential to contribute to and take part in 
FO activities.
Poorer and subsistence farmers may also be able to benefit indirectly through FO 
development, even if they are not members, by taking advantage of FO services that 
may be offered to non-members through certain spillover effects such as increased 
access to knowledge and technology, through community development activities 
supported by FOs, and ultimately through the opportunities that result from 
FO-driven local economic growth such as increased local employment, demand for 
labour and increased levels of service provision. These all have the potential to directly 
benefit poorer farmers, and thus FOs can be an extremely important mechanism for 
pro-poor development and poverty alleviation.