文章基本信息

标题：Contract Farming in the Mekong Delta's Rice Supply Chain: Insights from an Agent-Based Modeling Study
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作者：Hung Khanh Nguyen ; Raymond Chiong ; Manuel Chica 等
期刊名称：Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
印刷版ISSN：1460-7425
出版年度：2019
卷号：22
期号：3
页码：1-21
DOI：10.18564/jasss.4008
出版社：University of Surrey, Department of Sociology
摘要：In this paper, we use agent-based modeling (ABM) to study dierent obstacles to the expansion of contract rice farming in the context of Mekong Delta (MKD)’s rice supply chain. ABM is a bottom-up approach for modeling the dynamics of interactions among individuals and complex combinations of variousfactors (e.g., economic, social or environmental). Our agent-based contract farming model focuses on two critical components of contractual relationship, namely financial incentives and trust. We incorporate the actual recurrent fluctuations of spot market prices, which induce both contractor andfarmer agents to renege on the agreement. The agent-based model is then used to predict emergent system-wide behaviors and compare counterfactual scenarios of dierent policies and initiatives on maintaining the contract rice farming scheme. Simulation results firstly show that a fully-equipped contractor who opportunistically exploits a relatively small proportion (less than 10%) of the contracted farmers in most instances can outperform spot market-based contractors in terms of average profit achieved for each crop. Secondly, a committed contractor who oers lower purchasing prices than the most typical rate can obtain better earnings per ton of rice as well as higher profit per crop. However, those contractors in both cases could not enlarge their contract farming scheme, since either farmers’ trust toward them decreases gradually or their oers are unable to compete with the benefits from a competitor or the spot market. Thirdly, the results are also in agreement with the existing literature that the contract farming scheme is not a cost-eective method for buyers with limited rice processing capacity, which is a common situation among the contractors in the MKD region. These results yield significant insights into the diiculty in expanding the agricultural contracting program in the MKD’s rice supply chain.
关键词：Agent-Based Modeling; Contract Farming; Agricultural Supply Chain; Computational Simulation