| I. National Governments and Development Agencies should work together with agribusiness companies to make sure that participation criteria in CF offer equal opportunities to everybody. Certain political imperative or muscle or requirements should be used to increase openness and commitment from agribusiness companies to purchase from women and SSFs. For example, it may be made obligatory for any agribusiness company that at least a third of its contract farmers should come from a specific underprivileged group. Licenses for operating, as an agribusiness company should be allocated conditionally on compliance to that rule. Definitely, this will raise monitoring and enforcement issues that would be considered more deeply if such a policy were to be executed. Also, knowing that the company seeks particular attributes among its suppliers, Government and Development Agencies may move in to ease transaction costs of contracting with poorer farmers through group creation, agricultural extension, provision of certification services, investment in roads or irrigation and so forth. |
| II. Land reform programmes that bring change in ownership structure instead of dividing the land into smaller units, must be advanced. For example, it could be possible to allocate land to groups of SSFs collectively, such as through cooperatives. This will avoid dividing the farms into small plots, since the relation with agribusiness buyers is lost with the dismantling of the farm [144]. |
| III. Such lands could be reallocated to SSFs as a group so that the group as a unit can be responsible for a land size big enough to make it profitable to the agribusiness company to deal with them. An internal organisation rule would decree how tasks and benefits would be allocated within the group of SSFs. |
| IV. Increasing female participation so that they benefit from CF, intra-household relations should be considered by agribusiness companies. Distribution of contracts and payments should be made to the principal workers rather than the heads of the household. This will ensure that women will be able to register into CF in their own name and receive payment for the work that they do. The promotion of literacy among women will also help in increasing their chances to enter into and benefit from CF. This will definitely reduce current and future transaction costs of dealing with rural women CF Arrangements. |
| V. Contract farmers’ bargaining power also needs to be improved in order to increase their benefit from CF [29]. Therefore, Government and Development Agencies should deter the use of monopoly power by some buying companies and promote education and collective action amongst farmers. For example, government in this way can encourage a lot of business companies to be in the market so that farmers have many alternative companies they contract with, and could set taxes on exports. This will uplift their bargaining power versus the contractor and will avoid situations in which they are manipulated. |
| VI. Government and Development Agencies should work directly and together toward alleviating the constraints faced by the SSFs in order to reduce the need for CF. As mentioned earlier, farmers in Africa are undergo a set of constraints such as lack of information, poor connection to the market and lack of input and credit, which raise transaction costs of participating in the market. Contract Farming Arrangements are intended to alleviate those constraints and reduce those transaction costs. But if those constraints can be tackled directly by Government and Development Agencies, the need for CF would be reduced. Contract Farming Arrangements are mostly significant only in the early stages of economic development when transaction costs are the highest and its main functions are facilitating transformation from subsistence to commercial farming and stimulating growth and development of the agro-processing industry. But when the market grows and reaches the stage of mass production and spot markets transaction, the market functions well and the importance of CF is somewhat reduced [29]. This means that while CF is helpful for making up for current inadequacies in the agricultural market, it should not be relied upon in the long run. Energies should also be made to directly improve the market for agricultural expansion in Africa. Contract arrangements would then be just a short-term solution awaiting the results of the long-term market development policies that Government and Development Institutions have to plan at present. |
| VII. Ultimately, it is recommended that Government and Development Institutions support and fund new research methodologies such as randomized control trials in future research to draw definite and credible conclusions regarding the relationship between Contract Farming Arrangement participation and smallholder welfare. |