Contract Farming in Developing Countries

The Promise and Its Perils
2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-76486-8
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 284 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 516 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy

Contract farming is an institutional arrangement between farmers and businesses to produce and transact agricultural commodities at predetermined prices and conditions, and it has recently received a heightened amount of attention despite being a relatively old phenomenon. A new wave of agricultural industrialization and the emergence of large-scale food retailing in developing countries may be precipitating the unprecedented shift in favor of contract farming.

This open access book identifies the methodological differences across disciplines that have generated a false binary in discussions of contract farming. The author explains the importance of adopting a more integrated theoretical perspective, providing insights into the ways in which this can reconcile conflicting positions. Given the immense diversity of contracting schemes, commodities and contexts—as well as the substantial regional differences in contract farming experiences across a range of outcomes—a syncretic understanding of contract farming is essential to the evaluation of the promise and perils of contract farming. The resulting book proposes a way forward that is holistic in nature, framing contract farming within a comparative institutional analysis so that it can better accommodate multidisciplinary priorities.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Narayanan, Sudha

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Agrarwissenschaften Agrarwissenschaften
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Primärer Sektor

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Contract farming in perspective.- Chapter 3: Researching and theorizing contract farming.- Chapter 4: Towards a framework for contract farming.- Chapter 5: Operationalizing the framework.- Chapter 6: Why, when and how do firms contract?- Chapter 7: Why do farmers contract or not?.- Chapter 8: Market structure, outside options and motivations.- Chapter 9: The contract.- Chapter 10: Enforcement.- Chapter 11: The fluidity of contract farming Schemes.- Chapter 12: Welfare impacts of contract farming.- Chapter 13: Labor and the environment.- Chapter 14: The State.- Chapter 15.

Über Autor(innen)

Sudha Narayanan is Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, where she specialized in agricultural economics.