Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

What conditions can enable rural cooperatives and producer organizations to become successful and sustainable business enterprises? In the rural areas, farmers provided their best efforts for maximizing food productions not only to serve the people, but to get higher margin from financial perspective. They are not the enterprises or entrepreneurs. This is the vital business stage that avail maximum opportunity by collecting foods from the farmers and resale to the wider markets including participating on government food stock activities. They enjoy the maximum profit by exploiting the farmers. It is very common in Bangladesh. Therefore, the farmers are always depriving from getting the actual or expected price from their produced foods. Promotion of forming cooperative and producer organizations might be an alternative option where the farmers may also play the role of entrepreneur. It means the farmers will get the opportunity to search market for selling their own produced foods. In Bangladesh, there are successful such practices, which is practicing in south-eastern part of Bangladesh; the name of the district is “Comilla”. BIRD is the main organization for promoting such initiative. At the grassroots areas in Bangladesh, there is a constitutional provision of serving the people through establishing GO-NGO network. It is considered as the entry point to organize farmers in formation of a cooperative or in other form, the producer organization. NGOs can take initiative to organize the farmers for adopting such type of opportunity in formation of cooperatives or producer organizations by maintaining close collaboration with the local government organization. NGOs have direct access among the general people. So, active initiative of NGOs in organizing farmers can be an effective initiative. Because the farmers haven’t the process and knowledge of cooperatives and producers organizations, therefore, NGOs may provide technical cooperation to the farmers in this regards by transforming knowledge. Different types if capacity building and ignition initiatives can be taken for promoting farmers. Mr. Abdul Hakim is the main and successful initiator in Bangladesh of experiencing such type of practices. Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD), Comilla, Bangladesh is the organization which established by the renowned person. You may visit the official website: http://www.bard.gov.bd/ for getting results of various types of researches and studies. Major considering factors are mentioned below: Policy framework Consultative and discussion processes Apply Community Based Participatory Approaches Capacity Building initiatives: message dissemination in different forms, campaign, rally Networking among different stakeholders Favorable business environment: ensure open market situation With best regards, Waled Mahmud Management and CBO Expert ============================================== Waled Mahmud, MDS, M.Com, PG Dip. Mgt. Consultancy Executive Director Knowledge Discovery