Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management: concepts and experiences

Improved market access through increased ability to meet market 
requirements 
Small-scale aquaculture farmers are facing increasing challenges to access markets 
owing to increasingly strict requirements such as meeting food safety standards, 
certification, ecolabelling and traceability, pushing the costs and risks of complying 
with these standards further down the market chain to farmers. These requirements are 
especially stringent for export commodities (such as shrimp), thus small-scale shrimp 
farmers in India face many challenges in accessing markets even though there is strong 
demand for their products. However, through the society model and the collective use 
of BMPs to control the hygiene and safety of shrimp, small-scale shrimp farmers are 
much better placed to address these challenges and meet retailer demands related to 
social, environment and food safety standards by working together. As such, farmer 
societies have been making real progress in accessing export markets. 
Certification
One of the biggest achievements of farmer societies related to market access is the 
recent organic certification of giant river prawn (scampi as sold in Europe) from 
two societies in Andhra Pradesh by Naturland, one of the major certification 
organizations for organic produce in the world, with the financial help of MPEDA’s 
“Indian Organic Aquaculture Project”, a collaborative project with the Swiss Import 
Promotion Programme. This is the first of its kind in the aquaculture sector, making it 
an extremely important achievement and a big step forward for small-scale aquaculture 
farmers looking to access increasingly difficult export markets. The idea to become 
organically certified originated with the farmers themselves, who approached NaCSA 
for support. NACA is currently collaborating with NaCSA to develop “Cluster 
Certification Guidelines” in order to help all farmer societies increase their chances of 
achieving group certification of any type, ranging from Fairtrade to GLOBALGAP 
to the Aquaculture Certification Council (ACC), for example. By achieving group 
organic certification, these farmer societies have proved themselves to be a good model 
TABLE A2.3