This book deals with an agricultural production and marketing system known as contract farming (CF). In this system, a public or private agency purchases the crops of independent farmers through contracts, often providing inputs, technical assistance and marketing. CF has a long history in developed countries and has spread to the Third World. The book uses case studies from North America, Latin America and Africa to assess the experience to date and provide guidelines for the use of CF in the future.

This book includes examples of achieving wider change in smallholder agriculture, through influencing policy decisions, linking smallholders to value chains, innovating service provision for small farmers, with an emphasis on promoting equitable livelihoods and developing rural women's economic leadership.

Across the world, agriculture, on which all human life depends - is under sustained attack by big business. Small farmers are everywhere being forced off the land and replaced by big corporate outfits whose sole aim is profit maximisation. The industrial farming practised by agribusinesses is marked by land degradation and heavy use of insecticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Agribusiness is also a big contributor to global warming. But contrary to myths spread by big business apologists ... family farms are many times more productive and better cared for than large holdings. Author Alan Broughton makes an incisive survey of the ills of neoliberal agriculture and highlights the alternatives. Several articles by Elena Garcia focus specifically on Australia and the battle for an agricultural system not dominated by the giant corporations. This is a primer on what's wrong with corporate profit-centred agriculture and the fight for a people-centred alternative.

Globally, there are about 500 million small farms from which two billion people derive their livelihoods. These farmers face a host of challenges to access both domestic and international markets. This thesis examines the Buabin Oil Palm Outgrower Project as a case of small holder integration into the supply chain of Unilever Ghana, a multinational agribusiness company. In partnership with the public sector, the private sector and a development agency donor, Unilever Ghana is developing 3,000 hectares of oil palm through an outgrower scheme, in which the farmer beneficiaries maintain ownership of their land. I find that the key actors' experiences in the project - even in this early stage, the third year of a five-year implementation phase - demonstrate most importantly that there is not one engineered solution for working with small farmers. Each of the actors' strong motivations but diverse, and sometimes conflicting, agendas combined with logistical challenges require that Unilever Ghana be flexible and adaptable, contrary to the nature of the standardized model of a multinational. I conclude that agribusiness multinationals require a partner, or locally embedded subsidiary, with local knowledge and international development expertise as a facilitator to bridge the gap between standard corporate models and the complexity of working with small farmers.

For big business in Germany and around the world, Hitler and his National Socialist party were good news. Business was bad in the 1930s, and for multinational corporations Germany was a bright spot in a world suffering from the Great Depression. As Jacques R. Pauwels explains in this book, corporations were delighted with the profits that came from re-arming Germany, and then supplying both sides of the Second World War. Recent historical research in Germany has laid bare the links between Hitler's regime and big German firms. Scholars have now also documented the role of American firms — General Motors, IBM, Standard Oil, Ford, and many others — whose German subsidiaries eagerly sold equipment, weapons, and fuel needed for the German war machine. A key roadblock to America's late entry into the Second World War was behind-the-scenes pressure from US corporations seeking to protect their profitable business selling to both sides. Basing his work on the recent findings of scholars in many European countries and the US, Pauwels explains how Hitler gained and held the support of powerful business interests who found the well-liked oneparty fascist government, ready and willing to protect the property and profits of big business. He documents the role of the many multinationals in business today who supported Hitler and gained from the Nazi government's horrendous measures.