The paper provides a selective survey of the most significant literature on the rise of contract farming in developing countries, with a focus on sub‐Saharan Africa. The review of the literature illustrates ideological debates around the meaning and significance of contract farming and whether it is good or bad for small‐scale farmers. The paper then divides the review of the literature into three key themes. First, it addresses the quantitative significance of contract farming in Africa, which may not be as important as it is often portrayed. Second, the paper highlights the substantial diversity of contract farming in Africa and problems with excessive generalizations. Third, it discusses the various drivers fuelling the spread of contract farming, which reflect new production conditions and existing constraints, tendencies and counter‐tendencies, and both economic and political responses to changes in production and market conditions in the era of liberalization and globalization. The variety of drivers is substantial and defies generalizations about the emergence of contract farming. Finally, it briefly suggests research questions that tend to be absent in most of the literature on contract farming, and which are important in order to understand the current dynamics of agrarian change and transitions to capitalism in African countries.

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Certification systems (CS) set and monitor voluntary standards to make agricultural production sustainable in socioeconomic terms and agricultural trade fairer for producers and workers. They try to achieve a wide range of socioeconomic and environmental effects through bundles of interventions that include the process of standard setting and compliance, advocacy among consumers, capacity building for producers, building supply chains, price interventions, and the application of acceptable labour standards, overall to improve the wellbeing of farmers and agricultural workers. This paper presents the results of a mixed-method systematic review that synthesized the literature on socioeconomic effects of certification systems on agricultural producers and wage workers in low and middle income countries. The review followed the Campbell Collaboration guidelines for systematic reviews, and included studies published between 1990 and 2016 in different languages, with evidence on low and middle income countries. The review included a quantitative effectiveness question focused on a range of intermediate (e.g. prices, wages) and endpoint outcomes (e.g. household income). It also included a question on barriers, facilitators and contextual factors shaping effectiveness which drew on qualitative or mixed-method studies. Eligible certification systems were based on second-(industry-level) or third-party certifications, and excluded owncompany standards. For the effectiveness review, quantitative impact evaluations must use experimental or nonexperimental methods demonstrating control for selection bias. With these inclusion criteria, the review includes 43 studies used for analysing quantitative effects, and 136 qualitative studies for synthesizing barriers, enablers and other contextual factors. Most included studies report on initiatives in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and focus primarily on agricultural producers. The quality of the included studies is mixed, and several studies are weak on a number of methodological fronts, especially on statistical reporting. Overall, there is limited and mixed evidence on the effects of CS on a range of intermediate and final socioeconomic outcomes for agricultural producers and wage workers. There are positive effects on prices and income from the sale of produce is higher for certified farmers. However, workers' wages do not seem to benefit from the presence of CS and, further along the causal chain, we find no evidence that total household income improves with certification. The integrated synthesis of quantitative and qualitative studies shows that context matters substantially in all causal chains and multiple factors shape the effectiveness and causal mechanisms that link interventions associated with certification and the wellbeing of producers, workers and their families.