Farmers\\\' groups for their empowerment

"United we stand, divided we fall." This is indeed not a mere slogan. It connotes unity against forces that take advantage of isolation of a farmer and reap benefits. The country's farmers, divided as they are, have fallen into such a trap. The ever vigilant middlemen thrive on an individual farmer's woes and cash in on his helplessness.
We have seen how farmers suffer with bumper potato harvests these days. The tomato growers leave their produce in the fields to perish under the sun. Newspapers published photos that showed dairy farmers spraying their milk on the streets. Had there been farmers' groups in Bangladesh, these could have served as a strong bulwark against invasion of profiteering middlemen.
Farmers' groups were first conceived of by Dr Akhter Hameed Khan in Bangladesh. But sadly his concept could not further flourish after his departure. Dr Khan, while narrating his bitter experiences at the National Press Club immediately after independence, regretted that he could not move ahead.
"I gave one piece of land used as cow-shed for turning it into a school when I left for the US. I was happy. But when I returned, I found the school becoming the cow-shed again!", he explained in presence of AZM Obaidullah Khan, then agriculture secretary.  
In fact, micro-credit operation of the Comilla cooperatives failed to click due to fraud/lack of internal controls, stagnation, diversion of funds, and ineffective external supervision. The central problem of fraud and weak controls was possible not only because of individual dishonesty but because people were not made aware of their rights, and were not in a position to voice their rights.
The officers and change agents were not ready to plan with local people and to report to them directly. The dynamic personality of Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan helped to mobilise and harmonise diverse groups to work towards a common goal for rural and agricultural development.
But the Comilla Model provided an experience to be profitted by later practitioners. In the early years of BRAC and Grameen Bank in the 1970s, both Fazle Hasan Abed and Dr. Muhammad Yunus tested cooperative approaches to delivering credit to poor people. They concluded that the cooperative strategy could not work in rural Bangladesh. Instead, both directly targeted the poorest people, while attempting to keep out those who were not poor.
A major reason for the prior failure of credit cooperatives in Bangladesh was that the groups were too big and consisted of people with varied economic backgrounds. These large groups did not work because the more affluent members captured the organisations.
The country's hardworking farmers need to be equipped with all the attributes of bigger farmers and given opportunities to share in the value addition through marketing and processing of their produce. As Prof Rehman Sobhan quite correctly said, small farmers should be grouped in cooperatives which would jointly purchase their farm inputs, own irrigation and other farm equipment such as power tillers, jointly procure, store and process their produce to ensure a better return from the market. Such cooperatives or even companies would be exclusively owned by groups of small farmers with no scope for capture by elites, which have given the cooperative movement in South Asia a bad name.
The government can initiate, with support from the World Bank, the USAID and other agencies, a move for forming farmers' cooperatives where the peasants could plan their future crops keeping in view the market projections. The task is not difficult to be implemented. All the union parishad chairmen could be assigned the responsibility of forming farmers' cooperatives in their respective areas. Upazila chairmen can be asked to coordinate the union farmers' cooperatives so that they could maintain liaison with the central government.
The food department procures rice from rice mills and traders at official minimum support prices and not the growers. Now that rice mills are being automated and have greatly increased their capacity, such investments can only be made by very wealthy businessmen. If the grain market is not to be monopolised by these large rice mills, there should be a strategy whereby cooperatives of small farmers would be funded for them to become the shareholders and even the eventual owners of the rice mills, cold storage plants, agro-processing companies and dairy or milk processing enterprises. In this way, the small farmers would be able to share in the much greater profits accruing to the middlemen and the modern agro-industrial sector which appropriate the lion's share of the profits in the agriculture sector.
Farmers' cooperatives will have the capacity to get necessary agriculture-related information from the government's Agriculture Information Service. A website-www.ais.gov.bd-has already been introduced and on an average, 5,000 people visit this site every month now.
The government has already set up 145 agriculture information and communication centres and efforts are on to establish 100 more such centres in the fiscal year 2013-14. A 'community radio' (FM Radio 98.9) has already been installed at Amtoli in Barguna district to transmit agriculture-related programmes. Farmers are getting agriculture-related information under mobile-phone based agriculture information service programmes. Even the terrestrial BTV, which reaches every nook and cranny of the country, could devote one channel to agriculture alone with folk songs that touch the hearts of farmers.    
Farmers' cooperatives can immensely benefit from agricultural information disseminated by the government agencies. It is against this backdrop that such cooperatives, strictly non-political, can work effectively as a launching-pad for getting across vital information still not within the reach of common farmers. After all, it is only agriculture which can alone ensure food security of the entire nation, not any other sector of the economy.
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