A fair number of farm workers who leave the farm remain within the broader food supply chain. In many low-income countries, off-farm work in the AFS already makes up about 25 to 33 percent of overall off-farm work . Off-farm AFS work is still relatively small as a share of total employment ; however, it rises to 25 percent when expressed in full-time equivalent employment as opposed to the number of people employed .The importance of off-farm employment in the overall AFS rises with income, from 9 percent of total AFS employment in Eastern and Southern Africa to 52 percent in Brazil and 80 percent in the United States .Asia’s experience shows that more successful countries develop their off-farm AFS as they pass through the structural transformation, and this leads to a more rapid reduction in poverty . In China, India, and Vietnam, the “supermarket revolution” has been more intense and rapid than in other developing regions, driven in part by private vertical coordination that has generated economic growth through the introduction of contracts, the creation of new credit and input markets, and tighter linkages between farmers and buyers . As agri-food systems develop, processing, logistics, and wholesale operations become more consolidated, incorporating advanced technologies in order to reduce costs and ensure timely availability of quality goods . In China and Vietnam,hydroponic nft there has been an emerging shift from small- to large-scale processing, logistics, and storage, driven by large foreign investments in fixed plants . India and the Philippines enacted laws that prevented foreign direct investment from entering the retail food sector, leading to slower growth .
Domestically funded market hubs have emerged in India, and they are expanding rapidly, effectively bringing modern markets to farmers .Non-farm AFS jobs are often also more easily accessible for women and poor workers leaving the farm, given their proximity and low entry requirements in terms of capital and skills.A large part of employment opportunities within the AFS is happening in secondary cities and towns , increasing their potential for poverty reduction, as most of the poor live in the rural hinterlands of these intermediate centers . Several recent case studies support the beneficial effects of the AFS and related development of agri-food value chains on labor force participation, income, working conditions , and, in some cases, smallholder participation in modern markets. Examples from the Future of Work in Agriculture conference include Sauer et al. for domestic food systems in Tanzania, Edwards for post farm oil-processing farms in Indonesia, and Maertens and Fabry for horticulture exports from Senegal to European markets. The latter shows how vertical integration of production to meet the quality and standards requirements for European markets increased not only labor force participation, employment, and income in the source areas but also educational attainment and a reduction in fertility rates—evidence that the development of agriexport supply chains contributes to the broader socio-demographic transformation, in addition to reducing poverty. COVID-19, by disproportionately affecting small and medium enterprises, may jeopardize the potential of these beneficial effects. The downstream AFS has expanded rapidly in developing countries across the globe as part of the transformation of food markets. Even in Africa and Asia, consumers now purchase 80 percent of all food consumed, implying that food value chains provide 80 percent of all food consumed .
As a result, food value chains in the developing world have become longer, stretching from rural to urban areas. Fragmented into many labor-intensive, informal, small and medium enterprises,AFS nodes often operate in clusters such as dense sets of food processing SMEs, scores of meal vendors at truck stops, and dense masses of wholesalers and retailers in public wholesale and wet markets . This concentration of activity is vulnerable to lock downs and other restrictions. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, food supply chain disruptions have been widely observed across the developing world. Many of the system’s smaller actors are undercapitalized, informal, and ineligible for government support. They stand to suffer the most without adequate SME support, paving the way for accelerated consolidation and lower labor intensity in the mid and downstream AFS nodes. Fourth, fears of a mass exodus of African youth out of agriculture, disproportionate with normal patterns of youth transition out of agriculture as countries develop, appear to be overblown. Given Africa’s youth bulge, youth employment is especially high on the continent’s policy agenda. There is a perception that African youth may no longer be interested in agriculture . Exit from agriculture is a normal part of the structural transformation, and rural youth, in general, are less involved in agriculture than their older cohorts. It is mostly through youth that the structural transformation occurs: young people on average are more agile, educated, and adaptive to changing labor market conditions. Rural youth typically have less access to land than their parents did at the same age because many parents are not ready to transfer the farm and land rental markets are underdeveloped. A recent study of sectoral employment transitions in six African countries shows that both adults and youth are leaving agriculture, but not disproportionately relative to these countries’ level of development . In their 13-country study, after controlling for location and agricultural potential, Dolislager et al. find that youth do not spend fewer hours in on-farm work than older adults in general, and only younger adults spend less time in own farming . Youth appear to access off-farm AFS employment more easily than non-AFS jobs, especially wage work in urban and peri-urban zones.
For rural youth, gaining access to opportunities both inside and outside the AFS is important, but promoting employment opportunities within the AFS is more likely to bring employment opportunities within reach of the rural poor. Fifth, sociodemographic changes, including decreasing fertility rates, rising rural schooling levels, and increasing participation of women in the rural workforce, further stimulate labor to move from farm to the non-farm AFS as well as to non-AFS jobs. Liu et al. , for example, find that, in Vietnam, the potential for agriculture to address youth unemployment is limited. However, as wages converge between rural and urban sectors,hydroponic channel the rural economy is diversifying into non-farm activities, and access to education has become the key driver of improvements in rural household well-being. Gender differentiated preferences may affect the farm-non-farm labor transition, as well. A field experiment in Ghana uncovered evidence that traditional gender roles lead to a division of labor that causes women to prefer investments in non-agricultural activities . This finding highlights the need to recognize women’s preference to diversify into non-farm activities in regions where gender roles preclude women from engaging in agricultural production. Arslan et al. echo this conclusion, finding that opportunities for wage employment contribute to the empowerment of young women and the rural economic transformation by speeding up the demographic transition. The dynamics described above raise the prospect of farm labor shortages over time, especially shortages of wage workers needed to meet the growing demand for food and agricultural products. This situation is already observed in high income countries across the world. Global press coverage documents labor shortages and reliance on immigrant farm workers on every continent where crops are commercially grown . The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a stark reminder of high income countries’ reliance on immigrant agricultural labor. There are four options to deal with farm labor shortages, which Martin characterizes as the 4 S’s: Satisfy, Stretch, Substitute, and Supplement. Farmers can satisfy and retain existing workers by offering them higher wages, less onerous working conditions, benefits, and bonuses to make work on the farm more competitive. Farm employers can stretch the workforce by increasing worker productivity, providing workers with better technology like slow-moving conveyor belts to carry harvested produce that enable workers to pick faster. The option to substitute may entail replacing laborers altogether by labor-saving technologies or relying on food imports instead of local production. And finally, farmers can supplement the existing workforce with foreign guest workers. All four strategies are being deployed to different degrees, depending on countries’ preferences and their position in the evolving labor surplus-shortage continuum. The corresponding public policy domains are labor and social protection, innovation and competition, agricultural trade, and migration. These go well beyond the traditional realm of the Ministry of Agriculture. This broad global assessment of the future of AFS work zooms in on the roles of productivity-enhancing innovation and technology and immigrant agricultural labor. The choice is motivated by persistent low labor productivity in African agriculture, the salient digital revolution, and rising anti-immigration sentiment in current policy debates. solutions .
Others view research and development as largely an exogenous, self-perpetuating process: new inventions lead to others by lowering the cost of technological development over time . Both could be at work in practice, with the development of digital technologies, for example, partly driven by forces exogenous to agriculture, but their adaptation and adoption in agriculture partly driven by the rising costs of labor. A famous example of labor-saving technology in fruit and vegetable production was the processing tomato harvester developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis and commercially released by Blackwelder in the mid-1960s . Within five years of its commercial release, virtually 100 percent of processing tomato farms in the United States used the harvester, and most planted a tomato variety genetically engineered to go with it. Integrating mechanical engineering and agronomics was a novel feature of the tomato harvester’s genesis. Over the next 35 years, harvest labor requirements per ton of processing tomatoes dropped by 92%, while the U.S. processing tomato harvest more than doubled .Recently, R&D has combined mechanical engineering with information and technology to find labor-saving solutions for more difficult to-mechanize crops and activities . Automated harvest of fresh fruits, like peaches and strawberries, is particularly challenging, requiring “smart” technological solutions like mobile robots, mechatronic systems with precision sensing, actuation capabilities, and robots that can handle soft, flexible, and complex objects. These machines and other sensors also gather data, which, in combination with cloud connectivity, advanced analytics, and machine learning algorithms, create a world of new possibilities to manage and increase efficiency along agri-food chains. The result can include a reduction in the use of other inputs, as well as labor, reducing the adverse impacts of food production on the environment as well as on farm workers’ health, for example, by reducing chemicals in the food chain. Many of these high-tech solutions are still in the development and experimentation stages, but others are “on the shelf” and already in common use . Clearly, if ever it was accurate to think of agriculture as an intrinsically low productivity sector, that time has passed. California’s tomato harvesters and “robots in the fields” seem far away from farms in low-income countries. Nonetheless, increasing agricultural labor productivity in the developing world will require increased use of technologies that enable the agricultural labor force to become more efficient and remain inter-sectorally competitive . As a result, agricultural productivity gains in much of the world may need to be induced primarily by more basic technologies, like small tractors, or mechanical devices that automate repetitive laborintensive tasks, such as mechanical rice transplanters. In some places, expansion of agricultural machinery services offers the possibility of increased mechanization on farms too small to justify the outlay to purchase machinery themselves. For example, Yang et al. report that in China, “in response to a rising wage rate, the most power-intensive stages of agricultural production, such as land preparation and harvesting, have been increasingly outsourced to special service providers.” In China, the use of these services has promoted a more efficient division of labor, allowing urban migrants to maintain higher-wage employment off the farm during the planting and harvest seasons . The increasing use of machinery services is not confined to Asia. It is also observed in Africa and increasingly facilitated by digital platforms, such as Hello Tractor in Nigeria,an app-based Uber connecting smallholder farmers to affordable tractor service providers. Nonetheless, many organizational hurdles to developing the integrated machinery chain needed to make it profitable remain .