Last updated on August 5, 2015
That was the title of my talk at the Rapid Agrifood System Transformation, Globalization, and International Development pre-conference held before this year’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Association annual meetings.
Here are the slides for that talk, which focused on where the empirical research on contract farming should be headed over the next 10 years.
Among other things, the talk went over:
- The need to move to outcomes beyond income. (This new working paper should be a step in that direction.)
- The need to study the mechanisms through which participation in contract farming improves welfare.
- The need for better causal identification, at least when it comes to welfare effects.
- A potential marriage between agricultural and development economics on the one hand and industrial organization on the other hand.
- The usefulness of the contract farming literature in studying the structural transformation.
There is no paper yet, but the organizers of the pre-conference–Tom Reardon (Michigan State), David Zilberman (Berkeley), Bart Minten (IFPRI), and Jo Swinnen (Leuven)–are hoping to put together a special issue of a journal on the theme of the conference, so there will eventually be a working paper, if not an article for a special issue.