That’s the title of a forthcoming article of mine (co-authored with Chris Barrett, Maren Elise Bachke, Hope Michelson, Sudha Narayanan, and Tom Walker) in World Development, in which we lay out a conceptual framework to study the participation of farm households in agricultural value chains in developing countries and survey the recent empirical evidence on the topic.
Here is the abstract:
Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, processors, and agro-exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing firm. We then synthesize results from empirical studies of contract farming arrangements in five countries (Ghana, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nicaragua). The resulting meta-narrative documents patterns of participation, the welfare gains associated with participation, reasons for nonparticipation, the significant extent of contract noncompliance, and the considerable dynamism of these value chains as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently.
Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.