An Analytical Toolkit for Support to Contract Farming
Organization World Bank
Year 2014
Over the past century or so, a wide assortment of pre-harvest agreements, joint ventures, deals, and pledges that can be termed contract farming have been brokered between farmers and buyers. During the 1980s and 1990s, contract farming was frequently criticized as a potentially exploitative arrangement, which favored the more powerful buyer and left the small-scale farmer and the environment vulnerable to abuse. More recently, there is renewed interest from policy makers and their development partners in contract farming as a means of leveraging the recent wave of large-scale investment in land and agriculture to include small-scale farmers and to link them to new market opportunities. The establishment of contract farming becomes a means to link small-scale farmers to markets, which may otherwise be inaccessible for reasons of distance, standards, processing, or any of the other disconnections and impediments that hold them back. However, there have been few attempts to evaluate donor-supported contract farming projects, either financially or economically, or to measure their inclusiveness and their impact in the community. This document aims to provide a task team leader with tools for a critical evaluation of projects promoting contract farming schemes before, during and after the life span of the project. This toolkit has three objectives: provide guidance on what kinds of contract farming schemes work well, and in what circumstances (the best practice function); provide guidance on how to analyze inclusive contract farming schemes in order to identify those with a good chance of success and sustainability - the right horse to back (the diagnostic function); and provide a framework for applying socio-economic and financial analysis to operations that support such schemes (the cost-benefit function).