Governments, donors and responsible agricultural investors are increasingly looking to contract farming as a more inclusive business model for agricultural investment, and a tool with which to redress economic power imbalances in relationships between small-scale producers and agribusiness. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) notes that women are largely ignored in this important effort, and we propose several ways to begin to address the problem. We are interested in exploring whether the contract can be an instrument for rebalancing not only power relations between the farmer and buyer, but between a female farmer and her husband.

The research on contract farming points to two disadvantages faced by female farmers: first, they often do as much of the work on the farm as their spouse but are not included in the contract, and second, they tend to raise subsistence crops, which are rarely contracted. Contracted crops displace the subsistence crops that women are more likely to grow.

IISD proposes that protection for women’s interests could—and should—be better built into the contract itself. The contract is the primary instrument governing the contract farming relationship. There are examples from different areas of law around the world where the law intervenes in private contractual relationships in order to protect the interests of the parties, particularly where there is an imbalance of power among the signatories. Principles from the laws governing responsible lending, franchising and consumer protection all provide inspiration for innovative legislative and contractual solutions that could be applied to contract farming, and in particular to better protect women’s interests. Ideally, these protections should be implemented through legislation or the use of model contracts, so that they apply consistently and uniformly to all contract farming relationships. Until that ambition can be realized, responsible buyers and managers of contract farming schemes wanting to improve the gender outcomes of their projects can already start building them directly into their agreements.