Epilogue

Much of the world’s extreme poverty is in rural and agricultural areas. Many young people living on farms in developing countries realize that they will never be able to climb the economic ladder and escape poverty if they farm as their parents and grandparents did. The bright lights of cities attract rural youth to urban areas at home and abroad, meaning that millions of people change both their residence from rural to urban and their occupation from farm to nonfarm each year. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that there were four internal migrants who moved from agricultural to urban areas within their countries for each international migrant who left her country of birth and remained abroad a year or more (...

Farm Labor in Other Countries

Countries with more than 50 percent of their workers employed in agriculture are poor, and countries with fewer than five percent of workers employed in agriculture are rich. The shrinking farm workforces of richer countries are more vulnerable due to rising shares of migrant, guest, and unauthorized workers. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are immigration countries that confront the challenge of protecting vulnerable workers who do not have secure statuses. Farmers in richer European countries hire migrants from poorer countries, including intra-EU migrants from Central European countries such as Poland and Romania. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse, the leading exporter of commodities ranging from coffee to sugar, whose farmers rely on migrants from the poorer north and northeastern states. Some Brazilian migrants face harsh conditions, leading to efforts to extirpate modern slavery.

Mexican Farm Labor

Mexico, like other Spanish colonies in the Americas, developed a haciendas or latifundia system of farming that required local residents to work for large landowners in exchange for housing and food; 2,000 families owned almost 90 percent of Mexico’s rural land on the eve of the revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1917 and gave land to the peasants. Post-revolution labor reform in the 1920s created ejidos, plots of land that could be farmed and transferred to heirs but not sold. The Mexican constitution was changed in the early 1990s to allow ejido land to be rented or sold on the eve of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), loosening ties between rural Mexicans and ejido land and contributing to massive Mexico–US migration between the mid-1990s and the 2008–9 recession. NAFTA also speeded up changes in Mexican agriculture, contributing to the expansion of farms that export fresh fruits and vegetables to the US. Large Mexican farms that export fruits and vegetables to the US rely on a million hired workers, including local residents employed seasonally and internal migrants from poorer areas.

US Farm Labor

Hired farm workers do two-thirds of US farm work. The hired labor system that developed in the western US in the nineteenth century has spread across the US, as the large farms that hire most farm workers expect seasonal crews to be available when needed and to fend for themselves in the off season. The major source of seasonal US farm workers is rural Mexico. Most Mexicans arrive as unauthorized workers and move to nonfarm US jobs after gaining experience in the US. Unions such as the United Farm Workers tried and failed to turn seasonal farm work from a decade-long job into a lifelong career. Farm-labor costs have been rising since the 2008–9 recession slowed unauthorized Mexico–US migration, prompting the 4-S adjustments: satisfy current workers to reduce turnover; stretch current workers with mechanical aids that increase their productivity; substitute machines for workers where possible and switch to less labor-intensive crops; and supplement current workforces with H-2A guest workers.

Labor in Agriculture

This chapter explains the two major types of workers employed in agriculture—farmers and their (unpaid) family members, and hired workers. The incomes of farm families are the difference between what they receive for the commodities they sell and the costs of producing them, while the earnings of farm workers reflect the wages they earn per hour, day, or week. The average incomes of farm families are higher than for nonfarm families, while the earnings of farm workers are lower than for nonfarm workers. About 40 percent of the one billion people employed in agriculture around the world are hired workers, and they are generally on the bottom rungs of the labor market in both industrial and developing countries. The share of work done by hired workers rises with economic development as farm production concentrates on fewer and larger farms.

Development and Rural–Urban Migration

Economic development is associated with rural–urban migration. Low rural wages provide a supply push to move to urban areas, while higher urban wages act as a demand pull attraction. Lewis believed that the marginal productivity of many workers employed in agriculture was near zero, so that workers could leave agriculture and hold down urban wages while the remaining farmers maintained the supply of food, justifying government neglect of agriculture in favor of industry. Todaro emphasized that high urban wages encouraged rural residents to move to cities without guaranteed jobs. Schultz argued that the best government policy was to improve education and health care in rural areas to ensure that rural residents are productive whether they stay in rural areas or move to cities. Most countries agricultural systems obey 80–20 rules: 80 % of farms are small and account for 20% of farm output, while 20% of farms are large and account for 80 % of farm output.

Buyers, Consumers, and Farm Workers

Could buyers of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables do more to protect farm workers? In many rich countries, fewer than five supermarket chains account for most fresh produce sales, giving enormous power to a relative handful of produce buyers if they elect to purchase only from farms that comply with labor laws. The food-safety model shows that buyers can change supplier practices. After contaminated produce sickened and killed consumers and reduced demand and grower prices, major farming associations developed and tested best practices to minimize contamination that were later incorporated into law, so that both private-sector buyers and government agencies enforce food safety protocols. The alternatives to government and buyers, such as NGOs that certify compliant farmers fee, cover a very small share of the fresh produce consumed in rich countries.

Protecting Farm Workers

UN agencies develop conventions and recommendations to improve protections for farm workers, governments enact and enforce protective labor laws, and unions and NGOs have developed a variety of strategies to help farm workers. The results are mixed. There are fewer children under 18 employed in agriculture, and almost none employed as hired workers on large export-oriented farms. The major UN labor agency, the ILO, is increasingly aspirational, recommending ever higher labor-protection goals even as many workers lack basic protections, although the ILO played a key role in Bangladeshi garments and Thai seafood to persuade those governments to do more to protect workers in order to preserve jobs in export industries. Trafficking and forced labor raise other issues, including the extent of the problem and the best remedies. Governments, unions, and NGOs are seeking the most effective and durable protection strategies.

Prologue

Jose Martinez wakes up at 4 a.m. to ensure he is on time for a ride to the fields. After a quick breakfast, Jose meets his raitero, the driver of a van that carries seven workers to fields up to two hours away. Arriving at the orchard at 6:30 a.m., Jose will work four hours, take a break, work another two hours and, after a half-hour lunch and an afternoon break, quit at 3:30 p.m. and make the drive back to the mobile home he shares with his wife and three children. Jose earns California’s 2019 minimum wage of $12 an hour or $96 for an eight-hour day, but was away from home thirteen hours. He paid $10 for the ride to and from work....