I spent most of last week in Dar es Salaam at the POLICOFA — the acronym stands for “Potentials and Limitations of Contract Farming” — conference jointly organized by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Mzumbe University. I was there because I had been asked by Niels Fold, one of the Danish researchers involved in POLICOFA, to give one of the two keynote addresses of the conference. The other one was given by Carlos Oya, from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who has published a really good review of the contract farming literature in 2012 in the Journal of Agrarian Change.
The title of my talk was “Empirical Research on Contract Farming: Quo Vadis?,” and it was a nice occasion for me to gather my thoughts as to where the research on contract farming should be going. If you have an interest in applied contract theory, agricultural development, agribusiness, and development, you can find my slides here.