Public and common interest in sustainable contract farming

•Contract farming definitions differ considering social, economic and environmental issues; it can come from private or public initiatives.•Current contract farming focuses on commodifying food, the countryside and labour, aiming to control land and peasants.•Neo-liberal ideology has marked a stage where individual interests and private dogmas override the need to look after the public interest.•Public interest is an obligation of functional states and their responsible institutions and requires sustainable practices.•Common interest is an interpretation tool and has a teleological connotation establishing a power relations balance within contract farming. This research article uses a multidisciplinary view to address the issue of public and common interest in contract farming schemes. Humanity is at a crucial point where food systems and institutions must offer a radical change to guarantee people's right to food. Contract farming today, influenced by the commodification of food, nature and the land, and neoliberal ideology, must be restructured into a more sustainable model. In a sustainable vision, redesigned contract farming can be a factor of change, particularly in the agricultural sector development, and therefore positively impact the general welfare of farmers. This article addresses the role of contract farming within the process of neoliberal globalisation and commodification of food, as well as ways to reformulate these contracting schemes based on the public and common interest. It reviews the use of this legal tool from its beginnings in the US South to the current ideological battles. This essay addresses the conceptual elements of contract farming, as can be seen in its definition, based on a comparison between English and Spanish literature. The research employs legal and social methods such as the legal-doctrinal, comparative legal, document analysis, historical and, in a certain way, some legal-empirical approaches. We show the importance of reconfiguring contract farming based on sustainable schemes under public and common interest principles. Thus, the results show an updated and multidisciplinary view of contract farming and some ways to reformulate it, considering the general guidelines of the common and public interests. This article, therefore, provides a comparative, historical and current analysis of the components underlying contract farming and how to move towards a more sustainable variant based on a more humanistic and balanc