Pathways to innovation for Gambian farmers through supplier contracts

Abstract

This article aims at examining how supplier contracts with agro firms affect the innovative activity of the suppliers, who are Gambian farmers. Employment and outgrower contracts are considered. In applying the notion of learning, the study elaborates a promising perspective on innovations, understood as changes in the use of technology that correspond to changes in farmers’ level of knowledge. Since information is a critical constraint to farmers’ adoption of new technology, the article tries to contribute to the understanding of social learning. The study is carried out as a multiple case study, allowing in-depth studies of seller buyer relations. Three pathways to innovation emerge from the study, but only one ends with innovation. This difference in ability to alleviate poverty points to a need to get the learning approach into perspective. A briefly introduced holistic perspective shows factors that can explain this difference. Another finding is that innovations are facilitated by contracts in agricultural value chains targeted for industrial policies that educate farmers. Beneficiaries of these policies create learning networks across traditional kinship relationships to take advantage of differences in skills and competences. Policies endorsing price subsidies and tariffs, however, seem to conserve traditional technology. A third result is that uneducated and aging suppliers can behave innovative suggesting that supplier contracts do not discriminate against illiterate, old suppliers. There is no case evidence showing that contracts for employment on industrial farms lead to new skills and knowledge that diffuse and trigger innovations in small-scale independent farms. The recommendations for policymakers are to enable grassroots farmers to innovate by providing industrial policy offering training for farmers, and leveraging social capital to help the development of learning networks and farmer field schools.