4 CHAPTER 1
RPOs have also played an important role in Latin America and Asia (see, for example, Damiani 2000, 2001; Berdegue 2001). In Colombia, the National Federation of Coffee Growers provides marketing services to a half-million coffee growers, most of them smallholders with less than 2 hectares of land. In India, cooperatives account for 22 percent of domestic milk production. They have played a central role not only in organizing milk production and marketing among more than 12 million small-scale producers (each holding just one or two cows) but also in moving the country out of chronic shortages and into the dairy export business (Sharma and Gulati 2003). RPOs also have a recognized role to play in the management of natural resources, where collective action among small farmers is often a necessary condition for sustaining the equitable use of water resources, pasture lands, and other common pool resources. Syntheses by Agrawal (2001) and Meinzen- Dick et al. (2002), among others, provide insight into the importance of group size, composition, and structure as factors that contribute to success in the collective management of natural resources.
Of course, RPOs also have a well-known record of failure in many devel- oping countries. Intractable market constraints, politicization of leadership, elite capture, and breakdowns in collective action are just some of the factors contributing to RPO failures (see, for example, Tendler [1983] on Bolivia and Banerjee et al. [2001] on India). This record of failure is a real- ity in Sub-Saharan Africa as much as elsewhere in the developing world. To provide some context for this study, we review here the history of RPOs in Sub-Saharan Africa in broad brushstrokes, from the 1960s to the present. At the time of the emergence of independent African nations in the 1960s, RPOs (more commonly referred to as cooperatives) existed in many African countries. In Anglophone African countries, such as Kenya, South Africa, Zam- bia, and Zimbabwe, organizations representing the interests of large-scale farmers played an important role in lobbying for state support for marketing, input supply, and research (Jayne and Jones 1997). Some of these organiza- tions, such as the Kenya Farmers Association or the Buganda Growers Associa- tion, were formed as early as the 1920s to organize the collective marketing of such cash crops as maize and were closely linked to state marketing boards and input supply monopolies (Ariga, Jayne, and Nyoro 2006; Develtere, Pollet, and Wanyama 2008).
Several exceptions in Anglophone Africa suggest that colonial authorities did have some interest in encouraging cooperatives among small farmers. Organizations established in the 1920s, such as the Kilimanjaro Native Farm- ers Association in Tanganyika or the Buganda Growers Association, sought to promote collective marketing of coffee and cotton by “native” smallholders. These and other smallholder cooperatives were generally based on very simi-
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