India’s Producer Companies and Small Farmers: Performance and Impact (India Studies in Business and Economics)

The book is an exhaustive assessment of the innovative farmer producer companies or co-operative companies in India based on 23 case studies of such companies, including all-women member PCs, across four states of India. It not only assesses the physical and financial performance of the producer companies (PC) as business entities per se but also examines their impact on members compared with their situation before they became members and also compared with their non-member counterparts. It  makes an assessment  of performance and impact based on quantitative and qualitative data from various stakeholders like producer companies’ employees, board members, and member and non-member farmers. The book analyzes data collected from farmer members and non-members of these PCs and compares performance of PC across promoters within a state and thus assesses the goodness of promotion model of each promoter studied. The methodology used is mixed methods approach wherein case study approach as well as interview survey method have been adopted. More importantly, the case studies also include some PCs which were more of a failure than a success story, to identify existing challenges.

The book also examines aspects of governance and management of these PCs for practical and policy lessons.  Not just for research and academic fraternity, the book is also a  very timely resource for policy makers, promoters and practitioners of collective action among smallholders given that Government of India has  promoted 10,000 new Farmers Producer Organisations (FPO) over the last five years by now (2024) with large producer organization and promoter funding; and has framed a new FPO policy (2024)  while many states already had FPO promotion policies and schemes.

Sukhpal Singh is Professor and Former Chairperson, Centre for Management in Agriculture (CMA), Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, Former Director General, Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID) Chandigarh, and Former Professor and Head, Agricultural Economic Research Unit (AERU), Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi. He has been conferred the title of the Fellow of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics for his contributions to the discipline and the Society in 2018 and is the President Elect for the Annual Conference (2024) of the Indian Society of Agricultural Marketing. He is founding co-editor, Millennial Asia – an international journal of Asian studies. He was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex (the UK), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (Thailand), the University of Manchester (the UK); and the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). Professor Singh specializes in issues of value chain analysis and management, vertical co-ordination in agribusiness, agribusiness marketing and regulation, and producer collectives. He has been a member of various committees/working groups of the Planning Commission of India/NITI Aayog, the National Development Council, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India, and the EC of the Mission on Integrated Development of Horticulture (MIDH). He was also a member of the GoI Committee on MSP, Natural Farming and Crop Diversification (2022) and the National Level Committee for National Co-operative Policy (2022). He has 15 books to his credit, the latest ones include 'Regulating Agricultural Markets in India: A Smallholder Perspective' (authored, 2023) and 'Reverse subsidies in global monopsony capitalism - gender, labour and environmental injustice in garment value chains' (co-authored, 2022). He has authored more than 150 research papers in international/national journals/edited books, besides 70 articles in newspapers and magazines. His research has included contract farming, organic produce value chains, food supermarkets, agricultural input and output markets and market channels, and farmer producer companies.