Linking small farmers to modern retail through producer organizations - Experiences with producer companies in India

Since the early 2000s, India's agro-food sector has undergone rapid transformations towards greater market share of modern food retail. This has impacted Indian agriculture and farmers as supermarkets reorganize supply chains towards more explicit forms of coordination. Compared to other developing countries, little has been said in the Indian context about what role farmer organizations can play to help smallholder farmers specifically, improve their position in those emerging value chains. In this paper, I address this gap and demonstrate that producer companies are a promising tool to strengthen famers' position in their relationship with supermarket chains in India, but one which needs further improvement. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.