The latest State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO 2020) flagship publication by FAO, dedicated to agricultural markets and sustainable development, global value chains, smallhoder farmers and digital innovation featured contract farming as one of the topics. 

The publication discusses the trends in agricultural and food markets, with recent trends and drivers for global agrifood trade, as well as the agricultural and food markets transformation.

Global agrifood and value chains are discussed, with prospectives on their evolution, participation and economic growth. Policies for promoting participation in global agrifood value chains are outlined. Global agrifood value chains are futher discussed in the broader context of sutainable development, with particular focus on environmental, social and health outcomes. Standards for global value chains and competition issues are discussed. 

Contract farming is presented as one of the examples of business models for sustainable growth. Contract farming is presented as an approach to integrating farmers into modern and global value chains. Contract farming can provide smallholder farmers with improved access to markets though there remains potential inequitable access for contract farming schemes with a high rate of exit. Sixty-one percent of contract farming participants had larger farms compared to non-contracted farmers. However, contract farming presents many advantages given farmer participation and time for the investments in contract farming to generate its benefits. Nevertheless, contract farming still presents many advantages for smallholder farmers.

Digital technologies in agrifood markets are presented with focus on digitalization of agriculture, but also reminder of digital divide and market failures. Application of distributed ledger technology in agrifood value chains is discussed. 

Publication is available in the CFRC library (link). 

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