“Contract farming may be defined as agricultural production carried out according to a prior agreement in which the farmer commits to producing a given product in a given manner and the buyer commits to purchasing it. Often, the buyer provides the farmer with technical assistance, seeds, fertilizer, and other inputs on credit and offers a guaranteed price for the output.”(Minot 2007, p. 1)

Eaton and Shepherd start their widely-‐quoted briefing note on contract farming by pointing out that, broadly interpreted, it is not new and covers many situations, in most parts of the world, for small farms as well as large. Thus any system of share-‐cropping, in which a landlord is entitled to a share of the harvest, implies a contract. The ancient Greeks had a system in which the harvest was divided between different stakeholders. Some of the most exploitative share cropping was in the Southern states of the USA in the last half of the nineteenth century. More recently, in Africa, farmers recruited in the 1950s to the Gezira irrigation scheme on the Nile in the Sudan signed contracts which required them to grow cotton and sell it to the scheme. Where a loan is secured against the value of the crop rather than the land, that is, where the costs of the credit are deducted from the payments made to the farmers for their crops when they are sold, there must be a contract; for example the World Bank funded schemes to support farmers growing a number of crops in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s. Contracts are also fundamental to agri-‐business, especially