Aquaculture farmer organizations and cluster management – Concepts and experiences
8
aquaculture products are produced) are key requirements
for the development of a
responsible and sustainable aquaculture sector. These frameworks should cover all
aspects of aquaculture and its value chain, provide economic incentives that encourage
best practices, prompting and
assisting farmers to elaborate, support and enforce
self-regulating management codes, and promote sustainability-conducive production
systems. However, the inadequate financial and skilled human capacity in developing
countries to enable better governance and management of the sector could threaten
aquaculture development efforts in the future.
The combined effects of liberalization and globalization
have also increased
economic differentiation among communities and households, and State withdrawal
from agricultural marketing has contributed to a highly
uncertain environment in
which input and output prices are determined by the market, often favouring larger
producers who are better able to manage price variability and/or absorb price shocks.
State withdrawal from input markets and service provision has left a vacuum, especially
in remote areas where incentives for private-sector service provision are lacking.
These global trends require changes in management for both large- and small-scale
farmers to remain competitive. Larger farmers have a much higher capacity than small-
scale farmers to adapt and benefit from such trends. Small-scale aquaculture farmers are
exposed to increased market risks, face enormous constraints in accessing markets and
services and integrating into modern supply chains, and are ill-equipped to benefit fully
from the new market environment and knowledge, resulting in potentially significant
social implications for many rural producers. Despite these challenges, however, the
aquaculture sector is growing, and small-scale aquaculture remains highly innovative
and makes a significant contribution to global aquaculture production. There are many
opportunities to improve the governance and management of the aquaculture sector
and thus increase the social and economic benefits to small-scale farmers. One such
opportunity lies in promoting and developing collective action among small-scale
producers in the form of FOs.
Agriculture FOs have been widely studied, and the experiences of market-oriented
agricultural products such as cocoa, coffee,
horticulture products, milk and tobacco
suggest that FOs and related institutional arrangements can be beneficial for enabling
small farmers to access input and output markets and support market integration
through
mechanisms such as collective, high-volume procurement of inputs and
reduction in transaction and marketing costs through joint processing and marketing
of products. There is currently little documented information on group formation
by commercially oriented small-scale aquaculture producers and related aquaculture
institutional arrangements. However, recent experiences
in the field show that
promotion of aquaculture FOs and clustering of farms and/or farmers, and managing
these clusters using appropriate BMPs can be successful tools for improving aquaculture
governance and management in the small-scale farming sector, enabling farmers to work
together, improve production, develop sufficient economies of scale and knowledge
to participate
in modern market chains, and reduce vulnerability. This governance
and management approach is a way of improving the economic performance of the
aquaculture sector and strengthening producers’ ability
to participate in decision-
making and self-regulation.
Many FOs have also failed. A large literature warns that FOs are harmed by attempts
to encourage them to scale up too rapidly or to undertake too many or complex
activities (Chirwa
et al.
, 2005). They can also be undermined by subsidies, by a failure
to focus on core commercial activities offering clear benefits to members, and by donor
and government support and interference that treat them more as development agents
than as private businesses (Stringfellow et al., 1997; Collion and Rondot, 2001; Lele,
1981; Hussein, 2001; Kindness and Gordon, 2001; Hussi
et al.
, 1993, Chirwa
et al.
,
2005).
