Challenges faced by members of FPO in Tiruppur district of Tamil Nadu

Farmer Producer Organization is formed through farmers and promoted by Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) which is the nodal agency to coordinate between the states and act as a single window for the technical advisory and also investment needs. FPO is a legal entity formed by group of farmers/primary producer viz. farmers, milk producers, fisherman etc. Farmer Producer Organization is a group of farmers based on the principles of membership, formal structure, common interest and developing technical & economic activities that will benefit to the farming community. Access to market is the major challenge faced by small and marginal farmers, so that the study was conducted in Tiruppur district of Tamil Nadu purposively because of more number of active FPOs in that area. Sample size of 60 FPO members was selected for the study. Proportionate random sampling method was adopted to select the FPO members as respondents. Problem Confrontation Index (PCI) was used to study the challenges faced by FPO members in Tiruppur district of Tamil Nadu. The challenges were categorized as personal, infrastructural, operational, economical and marketing challenges. The scores of each challenge were summed up and PCI was worked out. They were mainly faced by lack of time as personal challenges followed by lack of well-developed storage facilities as infrastructural facilities, lack of knowledge in ICT tools as operational challenges, lack of credit facilities as economic challenges and lower price for produce as marketing challenges respectively. This paper deals with what are all the challenges faced by FPO members in detail.