Farmer-Producer Organisations: Mapping Research Trends and Future Pathways- A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The farmers buy farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and livestock at retail prices, sell the farm production wholesale, and pay the freight both ways. This is the only profession that depends on hope. The farmers' Cooperative was established to enhance market participation and reduce transaction costs through collective action to overcome the above predicament. Our research intends to find out the research gaps and evolution of thoughts, identify lead authors and institutions, identify key thematic areas, discover new frontiers in the researched area, and help policymakers develop roadmaps for the farmers. Farmer’s Producer Organisations (FPO) is a new, emerging, and appealing agriculture area that has generated much attention from researchers, academicians, and policymakers. We adopted bibliometric analysis to explore the truth. This research paper aims to determine the volume of annual scientific productions, leading countries investigated in this direction, and also to figure out the critical determinants responsible for the growth of FPOs, easing them to formulate better plans and strategies for their smooth functioning. The author used bibliometric analysis and R open-access software to do the analysis. The research communities are all part of global scholars across different universities and countries. A total of 496 research works published between 2012 and 2023 were studied and retrieved from WoS using the search query “FPO”, “FPC”, “Trade and Pattern of FPO”, and “Sustainability in Agriculture”. This paper found that from 2012-2023, we found 496 resources and 1547 authors who studied in the field. The critical keywords in the FPO Study are "farmers" and "Collective action", and mostly USA tops in contributing to this field. We found the root and strong nexus where other researchers can connect to do impactful research. The authors identified four thematic areas to do further research.