Sudha Narayanan – författare

The Routledge Handbook of Contract Farming and Development assesses the main conceptual, methodological and theoretical debates surrounding contract farming, and its implications for rural development in the Global South.Contract farming has rapidly expanded in the Global South in the wake of structural adjustment, providing an intermediate form of agricultural organization between open procurement and fully integrated plantation agriculture. However, it is also a focus of contestation, with some viewing it as a “win-win” solution to the struggles of smallholders in the Global South, and others viewing it through the lens of peasant exploitation. This book combines conceptual and methodological contributions with rich empirical case studies, encouraging a holistic understanding of contract farming by transcending disciplinary silos. Overall, the book equips readers with a rich understanding of key themes, policies, business models, actors and social dynamics surrounding contract farming. It considers local and regional variations and contexts, and the broader implications of contract farming for agrarian change globally.The book’s comprehensive coverage of contract farming will be of interest to researchers across the fields of agricultural economics, development studies, rural sociology and agrarian political economy. Its insights will also be instructive for policy makers and development practitioners looking for a comprehensive overview.

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.