Smart Contracts in Agribusiness: Transforming Transactions, Procurement and Value-Chain Governance

Smart contracts, understood as computer programs that execute pre-agreed terms when specified conditions are recorded on a shared ledger, are frequently presented as a means of reducing delay, opportunism and intermediation costs in agribusiness. The claim is attractive because agricultural exchange is shaped by seasonal production, perishable and heterogeneous products, weather risk, delayed payment and weak contract enforcement, particularly where smallholders supply larger buyers. This critical narrative review examines how far the available evidence supports the use of smart contracts in three areas of agribusiness: transactions, including payment, settlement, finance and insurance; procurement, including contract farming, public food procurement and certification-linked sourcing; and value-chain governance. Peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2026 was identified through multidisciplinary and discipline-specific scholarly databases, citation chasing and authoritative institutional sources, and was appraised for design, evidential strength and relevance to agricultural contracting. The synthesis indicates that the evidence base is large but shallow. Most studies are design prototypes, test-network deployments, simulation or game-theoretic models and expert-ranking exercises, whereas independent field evaluations, cost data and outcome measures for farmers are scarce. Smart contracts appear most defensible where contractual contingencies are digitally observable, low in ambiguity and settled in digital money, as in automated payment against verified delivery events or index-triggered insurance. They are weakest where value depends on contestable quality judgements, physical delivery, renegotiation after shocks or relational trust, conditions that dominate much of agribusiness. The oracle problem, uncertain legal status, code rigidity, interoperability limits, digital exclusion and the concentration of design authority among lead firms constrain transformative claims. Smart contracts therefore complement, rather than replace, contractual and relational governance, and their distributional effects depend on who writes, controls and audits the code. Priority research needs include field trials with credible comparison groups, transaction-cost accounting, studies of dispute resolution and renegotiation, inclusion-sensitive designs for smallholders and comparative legal analysis. A measured conclusion is that smart contracts can automate well-specified fragments of agribusiness exchange, but the transformation of procurement and value-chain governance remains a hypothesis rather than an established outcome.