Cooperative rice farming within rural Bangladesh

Highlights

• Rice farming in Kurigram Sadar is characterized by community-supported agriculture.

• Farming practices of Kurigram Sadar farmers are labor intensive and inefficient.

• Over 80% of Kurigram Sadar farmers would participate in cooperative farming.

• Mechanization could lead to substantial production increases and cost savings.

• Government support and regulation are crucial for reviving cooperative movement.

Abstract

It is often questioned whether cooperative agriculture by smallholder farmers can replace individual agriculture. This paper draws on a case study of rice farming in Kurigram district, Bangladesh, and provides insight into cooperative rice farming and potential of mechanization. Various cooperative practices (e.g. group rice harvesting and threshing) have been collectively adopted and used by small-scale rice farmers in Kurigram Sadar ever since the Liberation War of 1971. Rice farming in Kurigram Sadar is characterized by informal community-supported agriculture, which is both labor intensive and inefficient. Agricultural mechanization and institutionalized cooperative farming can reverse the situation and indirectly contribute to food security. Applied scenarios demonstrate potential benefits of cooperative farming, ranging from an estimated 12.6% rise in rice production due to reduced post-production losses and 41.5% increase due to intensified cropping to 92% cost savings through labor substitution. Kurigram Sadar rice farming is of great relevance to other parts of rice-growing Bangladesh as well, as most of the country is dominated by smallholder farmers employing similar agricultural practices.

Introduction

Agricultural cooperatives allow farmers to pool their resources in certain areas of activity for mutual economic benefit (Bishop, 2012). From modest beginnings in the 19th Europe (Hoyt, 1989), cooperative movement has grown into a 250 million member phenomenon worldwide (ICA, 2015a), with many successes reported in Kenya, Uganda, Jordan, Nicaragua, Romania, Israel and Germany (Agarwal, 2010; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), World Food Programme (WFP), 2012; Kokaisl, 2013; Tayeh, 1969). In Bangladesh, the largest milk cooperative has helped landless households, typically excluded by cooperatives, obtain dairy cows and market their milk, increasing their earnings as much as ten-fold (Birchall, 2003).

Agricultural cooperatives may be broadly classified into agricultural service cooperatives and agricultural production cooperatives (Cobia, 1989). Whereas the first category provides services such as trucking, storage, and credit, agricultural production cooperatives allow for pooling and mutual use of resources such as land and machinery.

Broader definition of agricultural cooperatives by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) suggests a more holistic approach (ICA, 2015b). Their seven internationally recognized cooperative principles go beyond economic dimension of cooperation and focus on provision of education, training and information, and concern for community. United States Department of Agriculture, however, argues that agricultural cooperatives cannot afford to internalize the ICA values and therefore must focus on fewer, more self-centered principles (Birchall, 2005).

Cooperatives form and expand when marketplace fails to provide needed goods and services at affordable prices and acceptable quality (Barrow, Burke, Molian, & Brown, 2005). In such cases, cooperatives empower their members to improve the quality of their lives and economic opportunities through self-help. They tend to strengthen the bargaining power of their members, obtain needed products and services on a competitive basis, improve income opportunities and generate greater profits (Barton, 2000). By cooperating, members share the benefits, costs and risks of production in equal proportion to their contribution (McLeod, 2006).

Farming and agriculture is where cooperative model is most widely utilized. An estimated 32% of the global market share in agricultural sector belongs to cooperatives (Bibby, 2014). Even though Bangladesh is a predominately agricultural country, with 31.5% of its population below the international poverty line (WB, 2014), cooperative movement did not achieve its desired goal of poverty alleviation (FAO, 2014b; WB, 2014). The paradox has its roots in poorly regulated and difficult to prove land ownership (Adnan, 2013; Feldman and Geisler, 2011), Islamic inheritance law that encourages further land fragmentation (Bosworth, Van Donzel, Heinrichs, & Pellat, 1993), and population pressures, among others.

Some 13 million rice-farming families, however, may still benefit from cooperative farming in a variety of ways including use of available agricultural land and machinery, group purchasing, and marketing of produced goods (BRRI, 2015; Wanyama, 2014). Cooperative model may be advantageous to government as well, since smaller number of farms makes it easier to collect taxes and distribute subsidies.

The paper focuses on rice farming as it accounts for 75% of all agricultural land use in Bangladesh, resulting in more than 35 million metric tons of rice per year (GAIN, 2013). The popularity of rice comes from it being, except for wheat, the cheapest source of calories and carbohydrates and one of the cheapest sources of protein and fat (Hossain, Jaim, Paris, & Hardy, 2012). Rice provides as much as two-thirds of the total calorie supply and about one-half of the total protein intake of an average person in Bangladesh, with an annual per capita consumption of 160 kg (BRRI, 2015).

Majority of rice growing families, however, use traditional farming methods, achieving lower yields compared to farms employing modern methods. Moreover, as much as 50% of those families are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land (WB, 2015).

The objective of the paper therefore is to re-evaluate applicability of cooperative model within Bangladesh’s rural areas and asses a range of cooperative scenarios using collected data. The paper first discusses historical context, as presented by Johnson (1982), Sharma (1997) and Wanyama (2014), along with the present state of cooperative farming within rural Bangladesh, drawing primarily from FAO’s reports on cooperative legislation and farmers’ organizations. The largely unfavorable depiction of agricultural cooperatives, coupled with the overall consensus on their capacity for addressing all dimensions of poverty reduction, forms the basis for the paper as it rediscovers cooperative movement and presents the arguments for its renewal. Next, the paper reports on features of rice farming in Kurigram Sadar and identifies mechanization potential resulting from cooperative farming. The paper at last quantifies potential benefits of cooperative farming using reported differences between cooperative and individual farming from the literature and articulates the importance of proposed Kurigram Sadar cooperative rice farming model towards sustainable agriculture and food security in Bangladesh.

The results showed that rice farming in Kurigram Sadar is characterized by community-supported agriculture reliant upon labor intensive and inefficient farming practices. Over 80% of Kurigram Sadar farmers declared they would participate in cooperative farming, even without government support, with percentage being higher should government provide regulatory framework, financing and new equipment. Rice production models revealed that cooperatively owned mechanization could indeed lead to substantial increases in production and further cost savings, although government support and regulation, along with reliable source of capital, are crucial in this case.