Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management: concepts and experiences

6.2.2 Certification 
As noted in the preceding chapters, certification, which is being rapidly introduced 
to the aquaculture sector, represents a serious challenge to small-scale aquaculture 
farmers. This is due to a number of reasons, including the small volumes produced 
by individual farmers and the large numbers of farms; low or no market incentives 
to become certified; limited access to market, technical and business knowledge 
and related infrastructure; and limited or inequitable access to financial services for 
investment in changes that may be required for certification. If certification has any 
chance of having a positive impact on small-scale producers, these issues must be 
addressed. It seems unlikely, however, that many individual small-scale farms will be 
able to be easily certified in the near future and, as yet, no certification scheme has been 
developed to target the small-scale sector. 
6.2.3 Institutional environment 
The institutional environment has considerable bearing on FO development, and 
institutional change can be a lengthy and difficult process. Thus, if FOs are operating 
in an environment in which institutional change is the only way they can develop and 
succeed, they will need to rethink whether their time would be better spent focusing 
solely on advocacy efforts towards the government for change; however, institutional 
change can take years if not decades to achieve. Nevertheless, as noted above, FOs 
provide one of the few ways in which small farmers can have their voices heard by 
those in power and as such should be encouraged to continue to advocate for change. 
6.2.4 External interference
While FOs provide an important strategy for small-scale aquaculture farmers to 
overcome some of the challenges they face, experience in the agriculture sector shows 
that FOs can be seriously undermined by attempts to encourage them to scale up too 
quickly or to take on too many or overambitious activities. They can also be weakened by 
subsidies, by a failure to focus on core activities offering clear incentives and benefits to 
members, and by donor and government support and interference that treats them more 
as development agents than as private businesses. Thus, inappropriate and damaging 
18
Both in terms of distance from markets and in terms of difficulty reaching markets due to lack of transport or 
infrastructure.

---

Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management – Concepts and experiences
62
interference from development agencies presents a serious challenge to FOs. FOs must 
be allowed to develop at their own pace and must be driven by the objectives of their 
members, not by the objectives of the government or development agencies.