Driving sustainable tea production: how cooperative membership influences the adoption of environmentally friendly practices in Sri Lanka

Factors influencing membership of dairy cooperatives: Evidence from dairy farmers in Thailand

Climate Change Adaptation by Smallholder Tea Farmers: a Case Study of Nepal

Cooperative membership and farmers’ environment-friendly practices: Evidence from Fujian, China

KSU Putera Mekar is the first cooperative to own a tea processing factory directly managed by smallholder tea farmers and produce dried tea products called Iroet t ea. The beginning of Iroet Tea factory, they sell their products to PT Sariwangi AEA (Agricultural Estate Agency) and other small companies such as Agriwangi and Elinkindo, but it does not go long. PT Sariwangi broke his contract with the cooperative so that the cooperative did not have a large customer anymore. Cooperative members are decreasing because the cooperative is unable to absorb wet tea tops from farmers and can not afford to pay farmers with pay-weight system, but the agro-industry business still survives. This makes the cooperative requires the chronological know the main cause of bad business cooperatives and the reasons for cooperatives to survive. The research design used in this research is qualitative with case study technique. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. The results showed that the main cause of bad business cooperatives is the loss of large consumers and the absence of bailout funds. The reason for the cooperative still persists to this day because the cooperative management has a good orientation to improve the business of I roet t ea agroindustry, supported by the loyalty of cooperative members. Keywords: agroindustry, cooperatives, loyalty, smallholder tea farmer

Nepal government has prioritized cooperative development for easy access to agricultural inputs, the adoption of improved technology, and the development of a sustainable market. A study was conducted to compare and contrast the perceptions towards the safe production behavior between cooperative members and non-cooperative members in Anbukhaireni Rural Municipality, Nepal Milijuli Krishi Utpadak Sahakari and Akala Krishi Sahakari were purposefully selected for the study. Ninety-one (91) cooperative members were randomly selected and ninety (90) non-cooperative members were selected through convienence sampling. A convergent parallel method was adopted, a face-to-face method of interview schedule followed by the mWater surveyor application was used for data collection. The five likert scale technique was used to indicate the extent of the perception of farmers’ towards various statements. The perception of the respondents was analyzed using chi-square test, and the Mann-Whitney U test. Probit regression was used to determine socio-economic factors affecting farmers participation in cooperatives. The cooperative members had the nearest market distance (z=-6.99, p<0.01) and were more involved in commercial farming (z=4.40, p<0.01). The probability of farmers’ participation was 12 % and 4.3 % higher for the farmers with gender as head of the household (z=2.52, p<0.05) and farmers who have received training related to cooperatives (z=2.09, p<0.05). In the perception study, the cooperative members agreed with the statements of input supply situation, saving/credit facility provided, technology adoption, and adoption on post-harvest operations as compared to non-cooperative members. The cooperative and non-cooperative members showed differences in the marketing behaviours with the point of sale (2=326.98, p<0.01), mode of transportation (2 = 250.65, p<0.01), and the price determination (2 =288.042, p<0.01).Therefore, training on the importance of agricultural cooperatives especially targeted to females, farmers with large farm sizes, and farmers whose farms are a bit farther from the market was suggested for safe agricultural production. Moreover, widespread development of the agricultural market (if not collection centers) should be made for sustainable agricultural production.

The study was conducted to determine the satisfaction of agricultural cooperative members, the relationship between the demographic characteristics of the members and their viewpoints on being important members of agricultural cooperatives in Igdir province. The survey data were obtained from 133 members selected randomly from 3726 cooperative members on the basis of Simple Coincidental Exemplification method and exposed to binary logistic regression analysis. In the study designed as two models, only a binary dependent variable is protects the benefits of the producer(coded as yes and no). Independent variables in Models 1 and 2 are demographic variables and items of the ideas about the organization, respectively. In the study, the benefits of the members, the concept of the organization's being reliable, conducting trainings for its members, and the idea of the cooperative members was estimated. The members of the cooperatives must be encouraged by training, advising, and collaborating researches to visit the cooperatives more often and to be interested in the activities. The young population should be motivated to play an active role in the organization so that a sustainable cooperative system could be maintained in the region.

<p>The study aimed to identify the determinants of the technical efficiency of Smallholder Tea Farmers (STFs) under UTZ certification system in Sri Lanka by employing stochastic production frontier using a sample survey of 75 STFs supported by the UTZ programme conducted between January and March in 2016. The results showed that a small number of STFs (11.8 percent) were over 90 percent efficient and the level of efficiency was found to be negatively related to coefficients of UTZ certified STFs and positively related to the number of years with the same plants. The results further showed the labor and fertilizer were the significant factors that determine the tea production of STFs.</p>

The widespread concern over disparities in health insurance participation among individuals is a global issue. This study delves into the influence of co-operative members' traits on their behaviour regarding health insurance participation. Specifically, utilising the Theory of Planned Behaviour, this study examines the impact of members' attitudes, behavioural control, and characteristics on health insurance participation behaviour. A cross-sectional survey was conducted involving 500 co-operative members, using a five-point Likert scale to collect their opinions on the influence of independent variables on the dependent variable. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling was employed to analyze the variables affecting co-operative members' participation in health insurance. Supporting the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the findings reveal that all three variables - members' characteristics, attitudes, and behavioural control exert a positive and significant influence on health insurance participation behaviour among co-operative members. Notably, members' personal characteristics exhibit the strongest predictive power (β = 0.629, p < 0.000), followed by members' attitudes (β = 0.171, p < 0.004) and members' behavioural control (β = 0.115, p < 0.040) in shaping health insurance participation behaviour within co-operatives. This study strongly encourages and recommends that insurers, whenever feasible, thoroughly examine and consider the traits of co-operative members that enhance and increase their likelihood of engaging in health insurance.

Tea production contributes 8.8% of foreign exchange earnings in Malawi. A study was undertaken in South-Eastern Malawi to understand the smallholder tea production system, estimate its technical efficiency and establish sources of technical inefficiency. A multi-stage sampling technique was employed to select 230 smallholder tea farmers, who participated in the study. Data analysis was done using SPSS and STATA. Smallholder tea production was characterised using descriptive statistics. A Cobb-Douglas Stochastic frontier model and Tobit Regression model were run in STATA to determine technical efficiency and sources of technical inefficiency respectively. The study found that the technical efficiency of smallholder tea farmers ranged from 16% to 92% with a mean of 67%. Education, distance to factory and farming experience significantly reduced technical inefficiency at 1%, 5% and 10% level respectively; and inefficiency was relatively low among farmers that utilised hired labour, and high among those that were contracted by government cooperative. Access to non-tea income was not a source of technical inefficiency. The findings of the study imply that various policies on extension and training have to be implemented to increase the knowledge of the smallholder tea farmers to ensure increased technical efficiency. Smallholder tea farmers should also be facilitated to access labour-saving technologies to enable them carry out timely farm operations.

444 Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Debarati Sen Fair Trade vs. Swaccha Vyāpār: Women’s Activism and Transnational Justice Regimes in Darjeeling, India During my ethnographic work among women organic tea producers in rural Darjeeling, India, I frequently faced difficult questions about the meaning and materiality of fair trade. Women smallholder tea farmers were gradually becoming conscious about the global popularity of the organic tea they produced. Whenever I showed Prema, one of the farmers, examples of fair trade publicity materials with smiling faces of women tea producers like her, she always offered comments such as: Another one! You know that smiling woman on that tea package is not us. It’s nice to know people around the world care about us so much, but why now? Where were these people when we had no roads, when no one gave us loans, when we ate only stale rice? What can they do for us if they do not care about what we women want? Prema’s sarcastic response is a powerful critique of the moral basis of the fair trade movement’s empowerment directives—directives that govern tea cooperatives in producer communities and that have specific consequences for smallholder women tea farmers’ political lives. It is also a rebuke of the virtual environment in which fair trade maintains its legitimacy. Similar pointed reflections on “fair trade” gradually revealed to me how intended beneficiaries of the global fair trade movement understood the value of fair trade in the context of their situated identity Debarati Sen 445 struggles and their efforts to gain social and economic justice. As a trade-based, transnational social justice movement, the key tenets of fair trade are to empower marginalized producers, in part by ensuring their participation in key decision-making institutions in their communities, and to promote social justice in general, with a core focus on women’s empowerment.1 It is also an alternative economic system, distinguished from so-called free trade by its biopolitical imperative to measure and manage the working of social justice through its trading system.2 Fair trade promoters and activist consumers believe that the ethical buying and selling of fair trade goods across nations can fulfill these overt goals by channeling new resources and governance mechanisms to producer communities. The fair trade product label stands as a proof and promise of trade-based justice work. What remains unexplored within this abstract global discourse on fair trade is how subjects of transnational justice regimes understand and mobilize around the governance practices of the ostensibly ethical transnational justice regimes of fair trade. In this article, I examine how smallholder women tea farmers in rural Darjeeling negotiate such regimes in the context of their specific identities (as housewives and savvy entrepreneurs) and histories of conflict over gendered access to resources in their own communities. Through long-term ethnography of fair trade operations and their effects on a smallholder tea farmers’ cooperative in rural Darjeeling, I contend that fair trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen gendered and patriarchal power relations in producer communities but that smallholder women tea farmers also make creative use of specific fair trade interventions to defend their own priorities and rupture fair trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies. AsIwilldemonstrateethnographically,thewomenfarmers’repeated juxtaposition in regular conversation of fair trade with swaccha vyāpār, a distinct Nepali iteration of fair trade that incorporates awareness of gender hierarchies, allowed them to articulate the shortcomings of fair 1. See Catherine Dolan, “Virtual Moralities: The Mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields,” Geoforum 41, no. 1 (2010): 33–43; and Sarah Lyon, “We Want to Be Equal to Them: Fair Trade Coffee Certification and Gender Equity within Organizations,” Human Organization 67, no. 3 (2008): 258–68. 2. See Debarati Sen and Sarasij Majumder, “Fair Trade and Fair Trade Certification of Food and Agricultural Commodities: Promises, Pitfalls, and Possibilities ,” Environment and Society 2, no. 1 (2011): 29–47. 446 Debarati Sen trade. In particular, this rhetorical strategy highlighted fair trade’s inability to promote their specific economic pursuits, some that were nurtured during previous participation in other transnational justice regimes such as microlending. Strikingly, women’s situated reading of...

The results of the study indicated that the age of the respondents, the type of animals reared, herd size, and membership in dairy cooperatives and districts significantly influenced the adoption of cattle insurance. The education of the respondent, herd size, the type of animal holding, and membership in dairy cooperatives significantly influenced the willingness to pay for cattle insurance. Willingness to pay was found to be less than the actual payment for the cattle insurance premium, and it was more in the case of crossbreds than other categories of animals. The type of animal and membership in dairy cooperatives had a positive and significant influence on the actual level of payment for cattle insurance. The landholding size, animal herd size, and non-farm occupation, along with dairying, had a positive influence, and the loss of animals had a negative impact on the net- income of the farmers. Finally, it can be concluded that cattle insurance is one of the best risk mitigation strategies to help farmers stabilize their income under risks and uncertain situations.

Climate change poses escalating threats to agricultural systems worldwide, particularly for smallholder farmers in climate-sensitive regions. This study examines the adaptive behaviors of farmers and their determinants in the Guanzhong region of Shaanxi Province, China, using survey data from 1,000 households. Guided by Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), we focus on three adaptation strategies: crop structure adjustment, irrigation investment, and agricultural insurance uptake. Logit and Poisson regression models are employed to identify the effects of climate risk perception, training, self-efficacy, institutional access, and resource capacity on adaptive actions. The results reveal that perceived severity of climate change and agricultural training significantly increase the likelihood of adopting adaptation behaviors, particularly among low-income farmers. Self-efficacy is positively associated with insurance adoption, while income and landholding primarily influence capital-intensive adaptations such as irrigation. Cooperative membership and policy support enhance institutional forms of adaptation, notably insurance uptake. A robustness check using a Probit model and heterogeneity analysis by income group further confirm the consistency of findings. This study provides new empirical evidence on the psychological and structural drivers of climate adaptation and underscores the importance of integrated policy design combining awareness building, capacity development, and differentiated incentives to enhance farm-level resilience in semi-arid regions.

The tea smallholding sector is the leader in national tea production in Sri Lanka. However, it is believed that increasing profit is very difficult without increasing costly inputs, considering the high cost of production. This paper investigates the technical efficiency of smallholder tea farmers (STFs) in Sri Lanka by employing stochastic production frontier using a sample of 120 STFs. The results showed that the average technical efficiency of selected STFs is 78.44 per cent. This indicates that output can be further increased by 21.56 per cent without increasing the level of input. Gender and access to quality extension services were identified as the variables that have the greatest impact on technical efficiency. The results further showed the labour is the most important factor for tea production.

The smallholder tea sector in Kenya forms the second-largest agricultural exporter after horticulture, contributing 4 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Modern communication technologies (MCTS) are key in supporting production, processing and marketing across the tea sector value chain. Despite the availability of all these technologies, their access and use by smallholder tea farmers for production and tea auction price monitoring are still minimal. Further, farmers’ perception of access and use of modern communication technologies is not well known. The objective of this study was to evaluate smallholder farmers’ perceptions on access and use of modern communication technologies in enhancing tea production in Shinyalu subcounty.The study was anchored on diffusion of innovation that emphasizes on the five attributes of an innovation. The study evaluated the farmers’ perception of access and use of MCTs. The study adopted a descriptive research design where fisher’s formula was used to get 162 out of 1,600 smallholder tea farmers who were systematically sampled and interviewed. Data were collected using semi-structured questionnaires. Likert perception test scale was also used test perception statements. The data was cleaned and analyzed in form of frequencies and percentages and chi-square The results established that majority of the tea farmers (36%) had acquired basic literacy levels of education to use modern technologies in tea production. It also established that modern technologies such as smartcard technology 78%, mobile phone text messages 62% and personal digital assistants 61% were the most essential tools for enhancing access to farm inputs, market information and tea management information. However, extension agents 61% played a complementary role in unpacking and linking modern tea technologies from the source to farmers. A positive association was revealed between farmers’ literacy level and the use of MCTs, which influenced access to MCT. The study, recommended re-tooling agricultural information dissemination agents and farmers on the existing MCT to enhance effective communication, promoting tea production yields and accessing market information.

The smallholder tea sub-sector in Kenya is considered the largest and one of the most successful smallholder schemes in the world. However, tea productivity in this sub-sector has been persistently low when compared with the estate sub-sector. Despite the smallholders planting high yielding clonal teas, the national average yield in the sub-sector was only 2,075 kg made tea/hectare (mt/ha) compared to 3,954 kg mt/ha in the estate sub-sector in 1998. This study investigated some of the factors contributing to low tea productivity in the sub-sector. Cross sectional data gathered in Kirinyaga, Nyambene, Nandi and Nyamira Districts in 1999 were used. It was hypothesized that the extend of rationality in allocation of resources in the smallholder tea enterprise is relatively low. Hence, smallholder tea productivity has remained relatively lower than in the estate sub-sector, high yielding clones and useful agronomic recommendations extended in the smallholder sub-sector notwithstanding. To determine \the extend of economic rationality\, \A Test of Economic Rationality Model was used whereby, the index of economic rationality, ρ is the product moment coefficient of correlation between log (total variable costs-excluding labour costs) and log (labour-in mandays) for each tea district and region. The results showed that the product moment coefficient of correlation, ρ was:- 0.647 in Kirinyaga District, 0.651 in Nyambene District, 0.793 in Nandi District, 0.743 in Nyamira District, 0.595 in East Rift Valley Region, 0.752 in West Rift Valley Region and 0.674 for all farms surveyed. It was noted that the lowest value of ρ was 0.595 in East Rift Valley Region. It means that at least 59 percent of the variance in the logs of both inputs is due to the variation in the systematic profit-maximizing component of these inputs. The balance of 41 percent is the maximum that could be occasioned not only by poor technology and/or knowledge gaps but also by errors in the model and noise in the universe. The null hypothesis was rejected in favour of the alternative hypothesis. The conclusion is that smallholder tea farmers in Kenya seem to be quite price efficient in tea production. Journal of Agriculture, Science and Technology Vol.3(1) 2001: 10-21