Introduction

 

    Farmers’ Association (FA) has four important characters; that is : economical, educational, social and political, which is said a non-profitable farmers’ organization of public welfare.

    The integrated farmers’ associations (FAs) of three levels in Taiwan are the federated system of multi-purpose farmers’ cooperative organizations in correspondence to the government administrative boundaries, and each association is named after the title of the related boundary respectively.

    There are one Provincial Farmers’ Association, 21 County/City FAs and 268 Township FAs (shown as below). Under the Township FA, there are 4,635 small agricultural units. FA membership is divided into individual member and group member, and each kind of membership can be further divided into regular member and associate member.

    As of the end of 2002, there are totally 1,009,061 regular members and 788,713 associate members in Taiwan.