This paper discusses the sustainability of an organization that was formed through a JBIC project. A vegetable and fruit production & shipment group in Khon Kaen Province, Northeast Thailand is presented as a case study. In rural development cooperation and assistance, forming farmers’ organizations has become one of the major techniques for project implementation. However, organizations that are created by aid agencies often stop their activities after project completion. The sustainability of the group management depends on the relationship between group members’ objectives as well as group management. In the case study presented in this paper, the group was introduced to a variety of marketing channels through the JBIC project to help achieve the group’s aims. But the motivations to join the group were different among group members and it lead to conflict among members. This put the sustainability of the group at risk. Using the framework of the theory of organization equilibrium, we describe the possibility of sustainable development of this case through interview data. Twenty-two farmers from the group and eighteen non-member farmers in the same village were randomly selected from Wan-Hin district in one of the JBIC project sites. A structured questionnaire was used for the face-to-face interviews in March and September 2013.
When the group was established, its purposes were 1) to grow safe vegetables for home consumption 2) to save home expenditures for food, and 3) to sell surplus products in the community market to provide safe vegetables to community residents. To achieve these goals, member farmers had several joint activities for learning and cultivating vegetables grown with fewer chemicals. However, the farmers’ motivation to join the group varied; some wanted to get new business opportunities, some expected free support from the project, and others sought a mutual relationship with community members.
Initially, the group shipped their products to the community market in the village until the JBIC project introduced the group to several market channels that purchased products on a contract basis that required specific quality and quantity of farm products. The member farmers had a free choice to select market channels and their selection was categorized into two types: (a) open-type sales channels, mainly shipping to the community market and (b) contract-based sales channels, mainly shipping to an outside organization such as a hotel and a hospital. Three member farmers, including the leader, were selected as typical farms of these two types of market channels. The group leader mainly focused on the local market, and he disagreed to ship via contract-based market channels, while two farmers preferred to outside market channels that gave them more profit.
The case study showed that all the three parties in the project; the outsiders (JBIC project implementers), the farmers who prefer open-type sales channels, and the farmers who prefer contractbased sales channels, all have different purposes and expectations toward group activities. In other words, the inducements to be a part of the group differ among them. Farmers who prefer open-type sales channels have a social inducement that is focused on the welfare of the community while farmers who prefer contract-based sales channels have an economic inducement that is focused on individual farm success. The farmers who prefer contract-based sales channels may not be stay in the vegetable shipping group if it can only provide a social inducement. Consequently, the group will not get enough contributions from member farmers and fail to distribute the inducements to the remaining members.
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