Do Producer Organisations Improve Farm Performance? Evidence from the Italian Fruit and Vegetable Sector

Producer Organisations (POs) are a central instrument of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), designed to strengthen farmers’ collective action, improve their market position and promote sustainable agricultural practices. Despite their long-standing policy relevance, evidence on whether PO membership yields measurable benefits at the individual farm level remains limited and inconclusive, particularly in the European context. This paper assesses the causal impact of PO membership on farm performance in the Italian fruit and vegetable (F&V) sector, where the PO model is most established and widespread. Using microdata from the Italian Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) covering the period 2014-2022, the study applies a Double Debiased Machine Learning (DDML) estimator to evaluate the effects of PO participation across multiple performance dimensions aligned with the objectives of Article 46 of Regulation (EU) 2021/2115. These dimensions include economic competitiveness, efficiency, financial structure, commercial and qualitative performance, environmental sustainability, risk management, and labour composition. Results reveal a nuanced and heterogeneous pattern across production systems. For permanent crop farms, PO membership is associated with improvements in output valorisation, quality-certified production, direct sales, investment intensity, and environmental indicators, alongside lower profitability margins and reduced asset turnover, suggesting a trade-off between quality upgrading and short-term cost efficiency. In contrast, for horticultural farms, the effects are more limited and often statistically insignificant. Overall, these contrasting patterns underline the importance of accounting for heterogeneity between production systems when evaluating the economic impacts of PO membership and suggest that policy interventions should be tailored accordingly. The study contributes to the literature in two main ways. First, it provides the first comprehensive multidimensional causal evaluation of PO membership effects in a major EU F&V producing country, explicitly comparing different production systems. Second, it demonstrates the value of the DDML approach for agricultural impact assessment, showing how high-dimensional causal methods can uncover complex and sometimes conflicting effects of collective action on farm performance.