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Smallholder farmers in lower-income countries often lack access to agricultural inputs, services, and markets. This holds especially for female farmers, with important negative implications for agricultural productivity, child welfare, and rural development. Contract farming is promoted as a means to improving farmers’ access to inputs, services, and markets – and thereby household income and welfare. Could contract farming also reduce prevalent gender disparities? And does it matter who within the household holds the contract? Here, we address these questions and explore patterns, drivers, and implications of women’s participation in contract farming. For this purpose, we use a unique dataset that is nationally representative of smallholder farmers in five African countries, which is the exception in this literature. Moreover, the data allow us to differentiate between different forms of women’s participation in contract farming, which is also an exception in this literature. We differentiate between female-headed and male-headed households and the gender of the contract holder. We find that participation rates among women are lower than those among men – but higher than previous case studies suggest. Our results regarding the importance of the gender of the contract holder for household living standards are inconclusive, for both male-headed and female-headed households, and there is great heterogeneity across countries. We conclude that the topic merits further exploration and discuss directions for future research and implications for policy.

Farm workers in developing countries often belong to the poorest of the poor. They typically face low wages, informal working arrangements, and inadequate social protection. Written employment contracts with clearly defined rights and obligations could possibly help, but it is not clear how such contracts could be introduced and promoted in traditional peasant environments. To address this question, we develop and implement a randomized controlled trial with farmers in Côte d’Ivoire. We evaluate whether an awareness campaign about possible features and benefits of employment contracts can influence farmers’ preferences and willingness to sign a contract with their workers. Choice experimental results show that – in comparison to the control group – farmers who were randomly assigned to the awareness campaign have a stronger preference for written contracts and a higher willingness to include contractual features with social benefits for workers. We also analyze treatment effects on farmers’ knowledge and behavior. Farmers in the treatment group are more informed about the procedure of initiating and signing a contract. They are also significantly more likely to have started this procedure by talking with their workers about a contract and making an appointment with the local authorities. Effects on actually signing a contract as the last step of this procedure are not significant, possibly because the time frame of the research was relatively short. Nevertheless, results suggest that information and awareness campaigns may help to improve farm workers’ employment conditions in traditional peasant environments.

While many studies analyzed effects of sustainability standards – such as Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance – on smallholder farmers in developing countries, most did not sufficiently account for systematic differences between certified and non-certified farmers. Certified farmers are typically organized in cooperatives. When sampling only from a small number of cooperatives, as previous studies did, it is not easy to disentangle certification effects from possible cooperative effects. Here, we address this shortcoming by randomly sampling from a large number of cooperatives, thus capturing a wide range of institutional heterogeneity. In particular, we collect and use data from cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire that are organized in Fairtrade-certified and non-certified cooperatives. Regression models with instrumental variables show that Fairtrade has positive and significant effects on cocoa yields, prices, and living standards. These effects remain significant also after controlling for cooperative characteristics, but the magnitude of the estimates changes. We draw two conclusions. First, in Cote d’Ivoire Fairtrade certification benefits farmers economically. Second, and more generally, cooperative characteristics are jointly correlated with certification and relevant outcomes, which needs to be accounted for to avoid bias when evaluating the benefits of sustainability standards in the small farm sector.

Agricultural commercialization can help to lift subsistence farmers out of poverty, but can also have adverse effects on gender equality. We explore whether private food standards - with their particular elements to regulate production and trade - could serve as a vehicle to promote gender equality in the small farm sector. We use gender-disaggregated data from coffee producers in Uganda and focus on two sustainability standards that explicitly address gender issues, namely Fairtrade and UTZ. Entropy balancing techniques, combined with estimates of farmers' willingness to accept standards, are used to control for possible selection bias when comparing certified and non-certified households. We find that standards and their certification programs increase wealth in male-headed and female-headed households. In male-headed households, standards also change the intra-household distribution of asset ownership: while in non-certified households, assets are predominantly owned by the male household head alone, in certified households most assets are jointly owned by the male head and his female spouse. Standards also improve access to agricultural extension for both male and female farmers. Effects on women's access to financial services are statistically insignificant. Private standards cannot completely eliminate gender disparities, but the findings suggest that they can contribute towards this goal.

Farmers’ preferences for sustainability certification are analyzed, building on a choice experiment conducted with smallholder coffee growers in Uganda. Farmers have positive general attitudes towards certification. While they dislike bans of productivity-enhancing inputs, benefits associated with agricultural training and special female support are appreciated. Many also see requirements that have to be met for certification as a welcome nudge to invest in better farm management and quality upgrading. Gender-disaggregated data reveal that female farmers have a higher preference for sustainability certification than male farmers. Also within households, significant preference heterogeneity between males and females is found for some certification attributes.