Farm commercialization: A transformation on hold or in reverse?

When food systems transform, farmers’ interactions with markets change dramatically. With changes from traditional to transitional to modern systems—as defined by Reardon and Minten (2021)— farmers move from mostly subsistence-oriented agriculture with few market interactions toward heavy reliance on spot markets for inputs, outputs, and services, and ultimately to contract farming. Such reliance on markets during these transformation processes has been shown to lead to significant improvements in farm performance and in agricultural households’ welfare. However, in a number of low- and middle-income countries, there is often a lack of clarity regarding which stage of transformation farms have reached and how to expedite such transformations. There is limited understanding of agricultural markets and farm commercialization in Myanmar in particular because of a lack of nationally representative and updated data on the farm sector. Moreover, over the past decade, the country has undergone substantial changes in its economic and agricultural market policies, as well as major COVID-19 and military coup shocks. This has all had significant impacts on the farm commercialization situation. To understand farm commercialization and its evolution, then, we first need an overview of these policy changes and shocks.