Contract Farming in Developing Countries - A Review

The structure of this review is as follows: the first section discusses how contract farming is defined for the purposes of this review and  briefly describes the history and extent of contract farming globally. The second section details the main factors contributing to the increased incidence of contract farming in developing countries, and describes the most common models utilised. Section 3 covers the main conceptual and theoretical perspectives on contract farming. Section 4 offers a tentative typology of contract-farming initiatives based on a comparison of thirtyfive “successful” cases and nine ”failed” cases. The fifth section summarises the analysis of 19 contracts, outlines the most common threats to contract-farming initiatives, as well as the innovations used to mitigate these threats. Section 6 concludes.