Collective action for agricultural marketing
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Kassie, G. T. Asnake, W. Haile, A. Getachew, T. Wamatu, J. 2020. Collective action for agricultural marketing - Training manual. International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: ICARDA.
Abstract
Farm households conduct their day-to-day activities individually and in groups in a
synchronized manner. Labor demanding activities such as ploughing, and harvesting are
usually undertaken with a group of individuals whenever the situation allows. In addition
to agriculture, saving and credit, funerals, and festivals do involve gatherings of selected
group of people with favors reciprocated more often than not.
Farm households in rural Ethiopia have rich experience with group efforts including
cooperatives, iddir, senbete, wonfel, debo, and equb. These formal and informal institutions
can all be considered as collective actions although in some cases these institutions are
imposed upon the communities.
One area where the role of collective actions is not strong in Ethiopia is marketing. There
have been numerous efforts to help farmers establish groups and cooperatives for the
purpose of making them access and be more competitive in the agricultural markets.
Scientific research shows that the culture of collective marketing is still at infant stage and
farmers are yet again simply price takers in the markets.
The need for creating awareness about collective marketing and the mechanics of
establishing and managing it is very clear. This manual is prepared as part of ICARDA’s
effort to contribute towards this agenda. The manual contains six main sections on
meaning of collective actions, types of collective actions, importance, steps to establish the
collective actions, makers and breakers of collections actions, and determinants of
sustainability of collective actions.
We have presented the relevant concepts and empirical evidence on collective marketing
focusing only on essential elements that farm households in rural Ethiopia need to be
aware of. This manual was not meant to cover everything about collective action and
trainers are encouraged to supplement it with timely and context-specific scientific
information whenever possible.
We encourage trainers to share their supplementary materials and modifications to the
manual. This will complement the revision of the manual that will be done regularly based
on the feedbacks of farmers and rural extension workers.
We have included publications at the end of each session for further discussion of the
topics. Suggestions on recent and contextual references will be highly appreciated. Finally,
we would like to indicate that this manual was prepared based on the efforts of numerous
researchers in the global scientific community. Yet, we thought it might not be necessary to
have all citations in the manual to make it easier to use.
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Author(s) ORCID(s)
Kassie, Girma https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7430-4291
Haile, Aynalem https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5914-0487
Getachew, Tesfaye https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0544-6314
Wamatu, Jane https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3544-6718
Haile, Aynalem https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5914-0487
Getachew, Tesfaye https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0544-6314
Wamatu, Jane https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3544-6718