Contract Farming (CF) is becoming increasingly important in
developing countries, partly because of domestic and foreign
supermarkets requiring sophisticated supply chains, partly because
of the growing use of quality certificates and corporate social
responsibility guarantees by downstream customers (Henson et al.,
2005; Swinnen, 2007). Recent discussions in the general CF literature
mainly focus on smallholders’ participation, contractual relations,
and on how to measure the welfare impact of CF. With the
objective of providing insights that can help to improve existing
and future CF schemes, this study has explored smallholders’ motivation
for participation. We hypothesized that farmers’ motivation
to participate in CF largely depends on the nature of the contract
design attributes. We tested this hypothesis by applying the DCE
method, which followed a literature review and an AHP approach.