Sustainable food production and consumption are important goals for an increasing number of consumers, policy makers, and other actors along global food chains. This is also reflected in the 12th United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal, which emphasizes the need for sustainable...

With the commercialization of agriculture, women are increasingly disadvantaged because of persistent gender-disparities in access to productive resources. Farmer collective action that intends to improve smallholder access to markets and technology could potentially accelerate this trend. Here,...

Many developing countries are experiencing a food system transformation with a rapid growth of supermarkets. Research has shown that smallholder farmers can benefit from supplying supermarkets in terms of higher productivity and income. Here, we analyze impacts on farm household nutrition....

During the last 10-15 years, mobile phone technologies have been widely adopted in most developing countries, including adoption by rural households that never had access to landline phones before. Existing research shows that use of mobile phones has improved market access for smallholder...

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...

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...

In Sub-Sahara Africa, adoption rates of improved crop varieties remain relatively low, which is partly due to farmers' limited access to information. In smallholder settings, information often spreads through informal networks. Better understanding of such networks could potentially help to spur...

Sustainability standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high-value foods. While previous research has shown that participating farmers in developing countries may benefit through income gains, nutrition impacts have hardly been analysed. We use survey data from smallholder...

Contract farming recently gained in importance in many developing countries. Various studies analyzed effects of contracting on productivity and income in the small farm sector. A few studies also looked at effects on agricultural labor use, suggesting that contracting tends to increase labor...

Contractual agreements between smallholder farmers and agribusiness companies have gained in importance in many developing countries. While productivity and income effects of contracting in the small farm sector were analyzed in many previous studies, labor market and employment effects are not...