Impact of farmer producer organizations in fostering community entrepreneurship

The Farmer Producers Organizations (FPO) are grassroot level, farmer managed legal companies which aggregate the small producers” inputs and products, perform commercial activities, and share the profits/benefits among the members. Currently, over 5000 FPOs are functioning in India, but their critical success factors in serving the member farmers are relatively unknown. The purpose of the study is to delineate the critical success factors and challenges of FPOs through perceptual impact of their members. This study follows survey research design to assess the perceived impact of FPO members from 14 FPOs from two regions of India. Data were collected through a self-reported and standardized questionnaire from a random sample of thirty selected members from each FPO to evaluate the perceived-impact on their member's livelihoods using five-point continuum scale. Member's perception towards performance of FPO was also gauged using seven-point continuum scale. The analysis indicated two dimensions of perceived impact of FPOs such as “Facilitating members for profitable farming” and “Fundraising for value addition”. The facilitating men=mbers for profitable farming included seven items such as “Increase in utilization of farm mechanization and power”, “Increase in input availability”, “Increase in cropping intensity”, “Increase in knowledge of improved production technology”, and “Increase in adoption towards production technology” while the Fundraising for value addition had three items namely “Value addition linkage and related infrastructure”, “Ways of raising funds” and “Dovetailing of Govt. schemes”.