Impact Of Agricultural Market Reforms On Smallholder Farmers In ...

On average, around 20 percent of the households belong to a club and only about 5 percent are
members of a cooperative or association. Clubs are smaller than associations and are made up of
several farm families. They are usually initiated by the extension officers of the MOAI.
Associations can be formed from a group of clubs. Clubs and associations are especially
important for the production and marketing of smallholder cash crops (such as tobacco, coffee,
and chillies). For example, in order to sell tobacco on the auction floor, a producer has to be
registered with the Tobacco Control Commission (TCC), which assigns him/her a registration
number. However, registration numbers are only given out to farms that are larger than 10
hectares. To be able to sell tobacco on the auction floor, smallholder farmers can either form a
club made up of at least 10 farm families and sell their tobacco jointly as a club, or they can sell
their tobacco to an intermediate buyer (IB) who in turns sells it at the floor.
In Table 5.3, membership in a club or association is also disaggregated by farm size. As shown
in this table, membership in a club, cooperative or association increases with farm size, which is
not an unusual result. We also note from results not shown here that male-headed households are
more likely to be members in a club or association than female-headed households. Of those
farmers that are members of an association, female-headed households only belong to tobacco
associations while about a quarter of the male-headed households are members in other
associations, such as for coffee, cotton or horticultural crops. Membership in clubs or
associations is also higher in the Northern region than in the Central or Southern region (37
percent of farmers in the North compared with less than 20 percent in the Center or Southern
region for club membership, and 9 percent of Northern farmers compared with about 4 to 5
percent of Central or Southern farmers for membership in an association).
In Table 5.4, more detailed socio-economic characteristics of the household head are
disaggregated by expenditure group. The average age of a household head is 42 and the average
number of years in farming is 19. Both average age and years in farming decline a little with
household expenditures. This may suggest that younger farmers are a little better off than their
older counterparts. As mentioned earlier, attempts were made to replicate the national gender
distribution of household heads. Therefore, about 34 percent of the sample is composed of
female-headed households. A higher percentage of female-headed households is found in the
Southern region (42 percent versus about 24 to 26 percent in the other two regions). Female-
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