Twenty‐five years ofLiving Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world

Abstract

The expansion of contract farming schemes through regions of the developing world in the era of the globalization of agriculture raises questions that are central to the study of agrarian political economy. Contract farming has extended the footprint of commodity production and integrated land and labour not otherwise captured in forms of direct production and marketing. 25 years after the publication of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a foundational collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, it is necessary to take stock of the most prominent developments in the practice of contract farming and in the political economy literature studying it. The ultimate contribution of Living Under Contract was framing contract farming as expressing the unevenness of power relations in agriculture and grounding it in specific political, historical and social contexts that were not examined in the mainstream accounts. This introduction to the special issue revisits the questions that have remained relevant or re-emerged in the political economy literature on contract farming; it raises new questions that reflect contemporary developments and it explains how the papers in this collection contribute to the expansion of the theoretical and empirical horizons of the

Climate precarity in rural livelihoods: Agrarian transformations and smallholder vulnerability in Vietnam

“…Increasing restrictions on rural land use, loss of land to migrants (either free or state-sponsored), exclusions from conservation zones, land grabs and other land use policies have all been significant (Dressler et al, 2016;Hall et al, 2011;Schmidt-Vogt et al, 2009). Shifts to export cash crops have increased the formality of market requirements (e.g., in standards for produce or contracts for delivery) (Bonnin & Turner, 2014), mirroring moves towards contract farming globally (Vicol et al, 2022). These processes can heighten climate precarity by forcing intensification on smaller land areas, increasing inequality between smallholders, constraining social connections as class differentiation increases and inducing outmigration for those unable to maximize and standardize production (Potter, 2001;Rigg et al, 2012;Tong, 2017), leaving even more low-wage and seasonal work for those who stay (Nanhthavong et al, 2022).…”

On meaningful diversity: past, present and future of Wageningen rural sociology

“…The notion of real markets implies that we add a socio-political and cultural perspective to the economic abstractions of markets (with supply and demand, prices, etc.). This sociological approach is used to get an understanding of the role of power in market relationships -for example, with regard to how farmers relate to different coffee market channels in Mexico and how contracts are used to discipline banana cooperatives in the Philippines (de la Cruz & Jansen 2018), or, more generally, contract farming as a mode of ordering in capitalist production relationships and its role in contemporary processes of market restructuring and agro-food value chains (Vicol et al 2022).…”

Matching ecological transition and food security in the cereal sector: The role of farmers' preferences on production contracts

“…According to Williamson (1985), it is necessary to choose the mechanisms that minimize transaction costs, i.e., the ex-ante and ex-post costs of planning, adapting, and monitoring task completion of an agreement intrinsically related to different sources of asset specificity and uncertainty. Under the NIE view, contracts gain momentum as interesting governance solutions in response to coordination, safeguard and adaptations needs, so as to lower transaction burdens (Ménard, 2013;Martino and Polinori, 2019;Vazquez-Brust et al, 2020;Vicol et al, 2021).…”