This book deals with recent reforms in the Malawian tobacco sector, but it is of much wider interest, as these reforms are intended to raise the incomes of agricultural smallholders. Many poor people in low-income countries live in rural areas, and raising the incomes of agricultural smallholders has therefore direct effects on poverty alleviation. Raising such incomes was crucial, for example, in the rise of the East Asian economies. The expectation in Malawi was that, after liberalization, smallholders would use their access to tobacco cultivation to raise their income. A large burley tobacco cultivation sector emerged in Malawi from the late 1960s onwards. Burley tobacco requires little capital and skills relative to growing other kinds of tobacco. It was farmed by sharecroppers on large estates owned by the Malawian political elite. Its growth and its marketing through auction floors were tightly regulated. This regulation unravelled after the collapse of the one-party state and the onset of democratization in 1994. The expectation was that the resulting liberalization would result in significant increases in the peasantry's cash income.

Since democratization and liberalization, the tobacco sector in Malawi has been far less tightly and hierarchically organized. New actors have emerged, and tobacco is marketed outside the auction floors. It is difficult to summarize the book as so many topics come to the fore, including district markets, intermediate buyers and the leaf-buying companies. However, a general theme runs through the book: new forms of governing the market have appeared despite liberalization. Contract farming – where the buying company provides credit, inputs, advice and sometimes food for the hungry months – is the most far-reaching initiative to govern supply and demand. It has to be distinguished from farming under contract: the latter is a mere contract to supply to one particular buyer. Prowse and Grassin say that, in 2015–16, ‘we can see that around three quarters of tobacco is now grown under contract in Malawi with one quarter through contract marketing and one half through contract farming’ (p. 96). Contract farming is said to raise yields and increase incomes, while it requires less capital investment (pp. 72–3). The authors provide an elaborate discussion on possible government regulation of contract farming to protect the farmers and the general interest.

This book is valuable for those interested in the effects of market liberalization versus regulation in peasant economies, in addition to those with a particular interest in the Malawian tobacco sector. Yet it steers attention towards unknown fields more than it gives answers. That is because of the methods employed.

The authors develop several theoretical angles, including value chain analysis, moral economy and statistical impact analysis. They claim paradoxically also to be inductive and not to approach their material through formal models (p. 7). I missed a more inductive approach with a clear narrative either in the style of contemporary history writing or through the sequencing of an anthropological extended case study. Farm-level observations are missing. For example, the authors’ claims about the benefits of contract farming rest on the reporting of a leaf merchant; this could have been compared with the effects on yields and income as perceived at the farm level.

This could also have enriched the meaning of tobacco farming in rural Malawi. On pp. 88–9 this is discussed in terms of a moral order where the rich man has to be seen to be of benefit to the community as well as accumulating wealth. The authors see a clear distinction between the market on the one hand and kinship/community obligations on the other: ‘One broker summarised his farming activities as “tobacco is business and maize is for assistance”.’ That separation was never made in my experience among tobacco farmers in the early 1990s. The word used in these cases is ‘kuthandiza’ and is mostly translated as help. However, this contains a mix of market relations and kinship/village relations. It has to be seen in conjunction with the frequently coined statement that a rich person in rural Malawi is somebody who has food. Poorer farmers run out of food before the new harvest comes in and then, in tobacco-growing areas, tend to turn to a relatively rich tobacco grower. The latter either will provide ‘help’ by employing them for piece work labour (ganyu) or will pay with food in advance for the tobacco to be harvested from the poor person's field. Therefore, while Chapter 2 suggests a very loose relationship between maize and tobacco based on statistical analysis, this may well be very different when observed at farm level.

Case material could also have been more elaborate in relation to political history. The clash between President Mutharika and the buying companies is mentioned in a few sentences (pp. 121–2). More could be said there. It is suggested that Mutharika introduced minimum prices. There were, however, minimum prices in place before liberalization. The companies disputed these when, after liberalization, much low-quality tobacco was offered. It is often gratuitous in a review to mention elements missing in a book and it detracts from the merits. I hope, however, to have also made clear that there is a lot to be gleaned from reading this book.