Farmer Producers Organizations (FPOs) is the emerging paradigm for social engineering of farmers in to organized groups. GOI launched a Central Sector Scheme (CSS) of “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 FPOs” to form and promote 10,000 new FPOs. The present study was carried out among coconut farmers in Pollachi Taluk, Coimbatore district. The objective of this study is to identify the factors determining participation of farmers in FPOs, to estimate the cost and returns of coconut and resource use-efficiency and also to analyse the impact of FPOs in farmers income. The results indicated that the age, farm size and distance to market were found significant and positively determine the farmers participation. The total establishment cost of coconut for five years is 2.74 lakhs. The total cost of cultivation of coconut for FPO and Non-FPO farmers are 1.24 lakhs and 1.23 lakhs respectively. In terms of resource use, human labour, N, P and Plant protection chemicals were under-utilized, while K and manure were over utilized among FPO farmers, while for non-FPO farmers the K alone over-utilized. The membership in FPO shows positive (0.09) and significant effect on farmers’ income at one per cent. FPOs are losing interest in doing value addition as there is marketing problems, so promoting agencies should give more capacity building, training and field-visits to the members.
Thirumarudhan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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