ECAS 2013

Who will use the millions of hectares of underused farmland in Mozambique? Big investors including Brazilian soya farmers, South African sugar producers, and Swedish churches covet the land and offer investment, technology and jobs - but sometimes evict local people. Many peasant producers want to become small commercial farmers, expanding to take most of the available land, but lack capital and technology. The national elite wants both personal profit as well as job creation and poverty reduction. A debate is growing about which way forward, and asking if there is a model in which international agro-business can use less land but support small commercial farming.

Historically, sugar has been the only successful plantation crop in Mozambique. Recent attempts at large-scale timber, biofuels, soya and rice have not been successful - although foreign investors are still pushing for land to try again. But contract farming, with tobacco and cotton linked to foreign corporations, and soya and cashew linked to domestic capital, has been successful. Each has been different, however the key has been guaranteed markets and inputs supplied on credit.

A confrontation is building, with international agro-businesses wanting large tracts of land in Mozambique, while peasants are increasingly organising to resist what they see as land grabs. There is not enough land to satisfy both sets of demands, but our ongoing empirical research provides evidence that suggests with care, the two groups can do business together.

Following Zimbabwe`s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), which effectively replaced the large-scale commercial farming sector with a much broader small-scale production base, opportunities for small-scale farmers to engage in contract farming have increased markedly. In fact, many households in our sample have recently taken to contract farming, especially for tobacco, where commercial growers have exited or where market failures have resulted in low supply and high cost of agricultural inputs. Given that the majority of rural households depend on rain-fed agriculture as the main source of income, except in drought years, we feel that this phenomenon deserves further empirical investigation. Who is engaging in contract farming and why? What are the terms of these contracts and who benefits? How have trends in agricultural production changed? And how might contract farming help in the (re)development of Zimbabwe's agricultural sector? We attempt to answer these and other questions by utilizing a unique data set, the Zimbabwe Rural Household Dynamics Study (ZRHDS) data, which is the longest running panel study in Africa. The data set is based on an annual survey of 766 households (166 of which were recruited in 2012) drawn from resettlement and communal areas in three of the five `natural regions` of Zimbabwe. Thus we are able to report on changes in agriculture, and specifically in contracting farming, over time and across different tenure regimes and agro-ecological regions.

South African agriculture is distinct to many other African countries since it is dominated by medium-scale to large-scale farms. The majority of these farms are owned, due to the countries political past, by a minority of farmers in the country. Since the political change in 1994, the government implements a land reform programme in order to redistribute agricultural land to South Africans that where dispossessed of their land. The land reform projects take various forms among which prior farm owners are mentoring new owners over a period until they have the knowledge to take over the farm management. In addition, partnerships between communities with newly acquired land and commercial firms are common. Lately there are also supermarket chains supporting land reform projects in order to guarantee their supply of agricultural produce and to gather points for the Black Economic Empowerment scorecard. The government is facilitating the process with training, financial and material support. Popular voices proclaim however, that a vast majority of these land reform projects fail. This is documented by a decline in employment and productivity.

This paper will look into the theoretical and practical challenges that these partnerships and mentoring programmes face.

This article analyses the differential impact of different types of food standards on farmer-processor/exporter relations. We also explore the perceptions about the impacts and essences of these standards. Data of 386 either GlobalGAP or organic certified small-scale farmers in the pineapple export sector in Ghana is used.

The main results are:

• First, farmers quite accurately describe the quantitative impacts in terms of costs, sales and income

• Second, farmers' perceptions and beliefs are dependent on how and by whom information is provided and are likely to be crucial for the long-term success of certifications.

• Third, certification is an agent of change in farmer-trader relations.

Certification alters not only prices and costs; it seems to be a driver of change in farmer-trader relationship and contract specification to a much larger extent than FBO membership or the specific buyer the farmer sells to. Self-reported changes include a more intense relation (farmer and buyer talk more often to each other) and an improved overall relationship following certification. In addition, written contracts are more frequent among certified farmers. In addition longer relationships (a larger number of years selling to the same buyer) correlates strongly with a better and closer relationship. We conclude that certification could speed up this process, i.e. be a structure that shapes strategy.