Last updated on May 14, 2018
I have been working on the topic of contract farming for 12 years. Although two thirds of my dissertation were about sharecropping, the third and last essay was about contract farming.
Given that it is the topic on which I have written the most so far in my career, at the end of last year, I pitched the idea of writing a review of the empirical economics literature on contract farming to a journal editor colleague. The end result, written with my doctoral student Jeff Bloem, is here.
Here is the abstract:
Although many urban areas around the world have grown steadily in recent years, the structural transformation, wherein an economy goes from relying primarily on agriculture and natural resources to relying primarily on manufacturing, has eluded many developing countries. In those countries, contract farming, whereby processors contract out the production of some agricultural commodity to growers, is often seen as a means of spurring the development of an agribusiness sector, and thus launch the structural transformation. As a result, contract farming has been extensively researched by economists and other social scientists over the last 30 years. We review the findings of the economics literature on contract farming and discuss its implications for development policy and research. In so doing, we highlight the methodological weaknesses that limit much of the literature on contract farming in answering questions of relevance for policy. Despite valiant research effort, many of the core features of contract farming imply substantial challenges for researchers aiming to study the question “Does contract farming improve welfare?” We conclude with a discussion of where we see the literature on contract farming evolving over the next few decades.
Comments are not only welcome, they are eagerly solicited.