Perceptions, Problems and Prospects of Contract Farming: Insights from Rice Production in Vietnam
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Lines 85-86: the farmers' decisions on participation also depends on Farmers' perceptions on cf. is there any literature support?
Line 122-123: what is the unexpected little attention has been paid to examine disadvantages
Figure 2: please do not use controversial maps in the paper
Not enough samples in line 337
Line 397 - line 399 line 447 - line 448 if the market price rises, what is the rate of farmers breaking the contract
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript entitled “Perceptions, Problems and Prospects of Contract Farming: In- sights from Rice Production in Vietnam” authored by Mai Chiem Tuyen et al. encompasses advantages and disadvantages of contract farming from the perspectives of stakeholders along with highlighting challenges perspectives of CF. The MS neither gives the impression of original research article nor a review paper. The data were collected through interviews, group discussions and participation observations. Subsequently data were analyzed using mixed methodological approach. After going through abstract, readers cannot comprehend methodological approaches used by authors and also remain clueless regarding sample size. Data analysis detail especially statistical approach is missing. The abstract looks like of a report instead of a scientific writing. In introduction, despite citing numerous references, authors have not been able to appropriately highlight the research and knowledge gaps by objectively analyzing the peer-findings on contract farming. Rice area investigation with respect to CF gives the impression of a highly localized study without any global pertinence. The qualitative data General Statistic Office of Vietnam etc. have not appropriately subjected to statistical analyses. Interview from sample size of 27 might lead to misguided results. “Seven FGDs were organized with the participation of 43 respondents” also presents too meager sample size. Ranking methodology does not present explicit interpretation of recorded findings. Results have been described using irrelevant details and results description also not matching the requisites of a journal like SUSTAINABILITY.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
It is a very interesting and well written paper dealing with the advantages and disadvantages, problems and prospects of Contract Farming (CF), with specific insights from rice production in Vietnam. Authors presented their literature review in a compact way, including a large number of references.
My suggestions to the authors are summarized in the following comments:
· The authors should further discuss what is the innovativeness of their approach, the beyond state-of-the-art process and who could benefit from their work.
· The findings of the survey should be provided in a more reader-friendly manner. I would suggest the authors to provide graphs along with the Tables.
· Conclusions are rather poor. Instead of summarizing the main findings, I would expect an analysis of this work’s contribution. What are the practical and theoretical implications and/or impacts? Who could benefit from the findings of this paper and how could he/she benefit? What are the managerial insights from this work? Are there any limitations of the present study?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The starting phrase of introduction must be split into smaller phrases and same needs to be performed through out the text. In result section, authors need to avoid too much speculation rather description of recorded data needs to be emphasised for briefness.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
