IMPACT OF FARMER PRODUCER ORGANIZATIONS ON BOOSTING ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF FARMERS

In Assam, more than 80% of the population is involved in agriculture. Lack of proper marketing infrastructure makes it difficult to exploit marketing opportunities and earn revenue from produces. To address this problem, the concept of FPOs was developed and put into practice. The present study was undertaken to investigate the impact of FPO on farmers’ economic empowerment in terms of services provided to member farmers, impact of income on members over nonmembers and impact of FPOs in augmenting member farmer’s income along with the factors influencing farmers to join FPO in Golaghat district of Assam. A total of 200 respondents were selected (100-FPO members and 100-non FPO members). Primary data was collected through pre-structured schedule. The secondary information was collected from Govt. portals. For analyzing the factors influencing joining farmers in FPO, Logistic Regression Analysis was estimated, the interpretation of impact of services provided by FPOs to their members was done on five-point scale of excellent, very good, good, poor, very poor. To analyze the impact of FPO on farmer’s income, Ordinary Least Square Regression was used. The results revealed that member farmers were male of young age, educated having nuclear family with agriculture as main occupation. The younger educated with smaller farm landholdings and farmers having distant markets are more likely to participate in FPOs and finally it was revealed that FPOs help in increasing income of its members by providing market facilities with assured marketing linkages and services like availability of inputs, custom hiring of machineries etc.