To enhance the welfare of smallholder farmers, development agencies increasingly promote “value chain agriculture” where farmers partner with more powerful entities such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to create new sources of economic value. Via an ethnographic...

In the 1980s and 1990s, during the high-water mark of Washington Consensus development, rural sociologists and geographers critical of contract farming described contract as a legal fiction—one that imagines formally equal and voluntary relations between large firms and small farmers and hence...