Strange bedfellows?: big business meets small farmer

Population growth and urbanization cause an increased demand for food distributed through modern food supply chains, dominated by a handful of large international agri-businesses. Primary production, quite contrarily, is dominated by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers in developing countries. Although big business and small-scale farmers might seem to be strange bedfellows, there are numerous situations in which they already form economic relationships. In the doctoral thesis, the focus lies on a peculiar subset of relationships, so-called inclusive business models, which consists of for-profit buying relationships with small-scale farmers in which the firm states to care about the well-being of the farmer. The thesis contains four papers. Two papers analyse the organisational structure of the economic relationship between firms and small-scale farmers. One paper takes a critical look at an often used way to measure the well-being of small-scale farmers: a food security indicator. The final paper is on coffee certification, a well-known example of an inclusive business model, and looks at its impact on the set of activities farmers rely on to make a living.

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