Derivatives and Development provides a robust critique of the case made by international development agencies for the use of derivatives to alleviate the poverty of small farmers in the global South. It dismantles the theoretical arguments in favour of using derivatives in development and theorizes on the continued advocacy of such policies by international development agencies despite their failure in practice.Analytically, the book approaches the subject from the perspective of 'poor farmers' in the global South, using a global commodity chain analysis and, in the core chapters, presenting a study of global coffee markets. Chapter two lays out the theoretical arguments that are presented for derivatives and development; chapter three then shows comprehensively that this theory fails in practice. In chapter four, the global coffee commodity chain and the coffee derivative commodity chain are presented and used to explain farmers' disadvantaged position in coffee markets and in coffee derivatives markets. This disadvantaged position in the underlying commodity chain is critical to the analysis of farmers' derivative use. The book does not completely reject the possible usefulness of derivatives; rather, it shows how farmers are excluded from their benefits by their position in the underlying commodity chain. Furthermore, because stronger players in the commodity chain can benefit from derivatives and farmers cannot, derivatives use by the strongest may even worsen the position of excluded farmers.Breger Bush's book focuses on small farmers as an analytical category, making certain assumptions about the way in which such a uniform category of producers is impacted by, and incorporated into (or not), global commodity exchanges. Breger Bush does, when discussing the global coffee commodity chain, make useful distinctions between producers and other actors in the chain, demonstrating how smaller producers are largely excluded from hedging, while larger estates, international traders and roasters all effectively use the instruments to their advantage.Rather than focusing on the issue of the categorization of small, poor farmers or questions around the notion of development, in this review I approach the book from the other end of the title: derivatives. In doing so I hope to highlight how the strength of the book -tackling head on the arguments of neo-classical theory and supporters of derivatives in development -also restricts analysis. The problem arises when considering what derivatives are for. The neo-classical case, that derivatives are instruments for risk sharing and hedging, is shown over the course of the book to be wrong. Derivatives are shown to be instruments used to trade easily, and in large quantities, a handful of short-term, highly standardized instruments -terms that bear little resemblance to the small, long-term, occasionally used, bespoke contracts that farmers would require. Despite this, derivatives as a hedging tool remain the organizing idea for analysis of the book. In order to show what der...