Ways Forward
The agricultural transformation is a quintessential part of economic development everywhere; people move off the farm and pressure on agriculture grows to feed a growing population. What this means for policy logically depends on what stage of the development process a country is in and what institutions and social norms are in place. But at the core must lie a policy package that raises labor productivity in agriculture, that continues to do so while leveraging the poverty reducing powers of the food system, and that mitigates the social adjustment costs inherent to this transition to avoid the introduction of inefficient policies such as a closure of borders for agricultural goods or laborers. This has been the challenge in the past and continues to be so when looking at the future of work in agriculture. We conclude by pointing out a trio of policy entry points for developing countries, at the early to middle stages of the agricultural transformation, and for high-income countries at the late stages.
The starting point for thinking about policy responses in developing countries is to recognize that agricultural labor productivity in many African countries continues to be dismally low, that current and future generations of young people are less willing than their parents to perform low-paying and onerous farm work, and that agricultural exports and emigration may offer fewer employment opportunities than in the past. However, domestic food demands continue to increase and diversify, and this creates important employment opportunities in the off-farm AFS. This means that both traditional and new digital technologies can be leveraged to induce a productive exit out of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa while maintaining a competitive agricultural workforce on and off the farm in the chains elsewhere. Three key policy implications emerge.
First, productivity-enhancing investment in agriculture must accelerate in the lower income countries and proceed at least in tandem with the movement of workers off the farm elsewhere. Populations will continue to grow despite slowing birthrates, and food production will have to expand to keep pace. The movement of workers off the farm to meet the demand for other goods requires producing more food with fewer workers, once underemployed labor has been activated. Historically in today’s high-income countries, agricultural extension and investments in infrastructure, from irrigation to information, marketing institutions, and roads, played a critical supporting role in facilitating the labor exit out of agriculture while subsequently. This has enabled the remaining farmers to earn a living commensurate with nonfarm sectors, as competition for workers with the non-farm sectors (including migration to urban areas) and downstream food processors intensified. This agenda holds as much today as then.
In China, agricultural wages are keeping pace with non-farm wages, and this underlines the important role of agricultural investments in the development process. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the agricultural share of public spending continues to be well below this in East Asia (3 percent on average during 1980-2012 versus 8 percent in Asia). Myriad input, factor, and output market constraints hold agricultural labor productivity back, and integrated solutions that simultaneously overcome a number of these constraints are needed. Inclusive value chain development (iVCD), which links farmers with buyers in contracting arrangements, offering knowledge, access to credit and inputs, and higher (less volatile) prices in exchange for a consistent volume of high-quality produce, provides a market-based solution to do so. Given the challenge to develop self-enforcing incentive compliant contracts, however, iVCD typically does not work well for raising staple crop productivity. Yet, in low income countries, this is where the need and scope for raising labor
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productivity and poverty reduction is highest. For raising labor productivity in staple crops, more and better public investment in public goods is needed (Beegle and Christiaensen 2024). Second, the scope for iVCD to raise smallholder incomes and benefit the poor and women is greater for non-staples. It also creates jobs off the farm, in the chains and beyond (through consumption linkages). Success factors of iVCD include careful diagnosis of the competitiveness and sustainability of the product value chain chosen, starting small, involving financial institutions, monitoring producer-buyer relationships, and sustaining capacity building. This is in addition to creating an economic environment that is conducive to investment generally. Developing systems to monitor and enforce food quality standards in the AFS are equally critical.
There is clearly a role for agricultural ministries, as well as for the private sector, to ensure that the development and use of labor-saving technologies keeps pace with the movement of workers off-farm. Many questions remain, however, especially on the best entry points for support: through farmer organizations/cooperatives, large anchor firms and/or SMEs, or externally initiated stakeholder platforms. More experiments are needed. Labor-market regulations and other social protections can also be useful in protecting vulnerable populations from exploitation as they transition into non-farm work (Swinnen and Kuijpers 2017; Barrett et al. 2024; Christiaensen 2024).
Third, investment in people is critical to raise agricultural labor productivity and to make sure that those leaving can access the new jobs in the AFS, as well as other non-farm sectors, and meet the rising economic aspirations of rural youth. Continued investment in quality rural education, which continues to largely underperform in developing countries, is needed (World Bank 2024). Increasing educational attainment in rural areas facilitates technology adoption, as well as occupational mobility, and reduces income inequality. This is also important for young women facing social norms that make it difficult to escape from traditional gender roles.
Nontraditional skill-building programs and effective agricultural extension systems will be equally needed to build up human capital in regions where traditional education has proven ineffective. The extension system is particularly weak in Sub-Saharan Africa, however, and has been largely neglected for the past couple of decades by governments and donors alike. The 2010s have witnessed a surge in studies on social network or farmer-to-farmer technology extension, which proves more promising especially in combination with public extension than traditional public-sector extension approaches. But several issues remain such as the choice and compensation of appropriate lead farmers (Takahashi et al. 2024).
Policy implications are different, but just as immediate, in high-income countries. Rich-country farmers will be required to produce more and higher-quality fresh and processed foods for a growing, and increasingly affluent, domestic and global population, and they will be required to do so under increasingly stringent environmental and animal welfare standards. However, they will have to do this with fewer workers. The transition of domestic workers out of farm work largely has run its course in rich countries. The option of importing foreign workers is gradually closing, due to a declining farm labor supply in farm labor-exporting countries and a less supportive political environment for immigration, particularly of low-skilled workers, in high-income countries. Three key policy implications emerge for high-income countries in this era of growing farm labor scarcity:
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First, farmers in high income countries (as well as the sending countries) will increasingly need to look beyond immigration policy as an answer to farm labor scarcity (surplus)—especially in the medium and long run. Guest worker programs can expand as a short-run response to farm labor scarcity. However, as the agricultural transformation progresses in farm labor-exporting countries and political resistance to importing low-skilled farm workers intensifies, the immigration solution to the farm labor problem becomes less of an option. This does not mean that immigration will not continue to play a central role in farm labor markets throughout the developed world for some time. But farmers will need to take steps to retain an aging, mostly immigrant, workforce while pursuing available options to contract new workers from abroad. International farm labor migration could continue to be a much-needed channel for sharing prosperity across nations and reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries. For this, however, a much needed counternarrative needs to take hold rapidly. If not, its days may be numbered prematurely. Second, increasingly sophisticated technological change is going to be a fundamental feature of the food supply chain, from farming to food processing. Productivity-enhancing investments likely will include the use of highly-advanced robotic systems that will dramatically reduce the need for workers (the workers will change, too; see below). Scouring the landscape in today’s high-income countries we find automation success stories like the ones described earlier in this article, as well as major challenges. There is a danger that automation will not happen quickly enough to enable farmers to maintain their competitiveness in a high-wage, labor-scarce, world. Farmers can respond by shifting their production into less labor-intensive crops. However, more affluent consumers will demand fresh, locally-grown fruits and vegetables, as well as specific qualities like organics, environmentally friendly production practices, fair trade, and possibly better labor practices, all of which tend to increase labor demands compared to field crops where automation is more advanced. Prices of these fresh fruits and vegetables will rise, causing farmers to think twice about abandoning production as wages rise while intensifying pressure on public and private researchers and policy makers to accelerate the development of labor-saving technologies and deploy the necessary digital infrastructure to run it, including in remote rural areas. Society will need to keep an eye out for undue concentration of power in the supply of these new technologies and devise adequate policies to ensure competition (Carolan 2024).
Third, a tekked-up AFS requires a tekked-up workforce, with more engineers and people capable of working with increasingly complex technologies. As agricultural and food processing technologies become more IT intensive, so do human capital demands all along the AFS. To some extent, developments in IT can help respond to human capital shortages; viz. bar codes in supermarkets and hamburger buttons at fast-food restaurants. Nevertheless, the numbers of workers with little education who pick themselves a living wage will diminish. As new technologies become available for relatively easy-to-mechanize crops and routine tasks, the farm workforce will move out of those crops and tasks into ones that have not yet been mechanized and are non-routine (e.g., farm tourism). A major policy challenge is to prepare the future farm workforce for technological change while also ensuring that employment opportunities expand as new technologies release workers from crop production. There is no magic bullet to guarantee that automation, human capital formation, and new job creation move apace.
It is undeniable that the future holds far-reaching changes in mechanization and automation in developing and developed countries alike. Without it, agriculture and the AFS generally will not be able to keep up with rising food demands and a declining farm labor supply. Inevitably, many
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farms and farm workers will have difficulty adjusting. Some farms and farmers, particularly larger, wealthier and better educated ones, are in a far better position to experiment with and adopt new labor-saving technologies, including advanced robotics. And some farmers and farm workers, particularly older ones, will have a difficult time shifting to new commodities and tasks; the more tekked-up farm workforce of the future is likely to be younger and better educated than current workers. Decoupling social insurance from employment, as proposed in Gentilini et al. (2024), could be a worthwhile social insurance model to mitigate adverse consequences of this transition and avoid the introduction of ineffective agricultural and food policies. Without successful social insurance schemes to help mitigate the adjustment costs and rapid ramp up in agricultural education and extension, the ongoing evolution in the agricultural labor force is bound to add a new voice to rising populism.
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References
Adu-Baffour, F., Daum, T. and Birner, R., 2024. Can small farms benefit from big companies’ initiatives to promote mechanization in Africa? A case study from Zambia. Food policy, 84, pp.133-145. Agrerholm, Harriet. 2024. Brexit: Farmers Allowed to Recruit 2,500 Migrants A Year Under New Government Plan to Plug Seasonal Workforce Gap. Independent, Sept. 6. Allen, Thomas, Philipp Heinrigs, and Inhoi Heo. 2024. “Agriculture, Food and Jobs in West
Africa.” West African Papers No. 14, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris.
Anderson, Kym. 2010. Ed. The Political Economy of Agricultural Price Distortions. Cambridge University Press: New York, USA. Arslan, Aslihan, Egger, Eva-Maria, and Tschirley, David E. 2024. Gender Gaps in Youth Employment: A Spatial Approach. Presented at the Future of Work in Agriculture Conference of the World Bank Group, Washington D.C.: https://farmlabor.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk5936/files/inline-files/3. Arslan_Gender gaps in youth emplymt_FOWAG_WB 20-03-2024.pdf. Barrett, Christopher, Thomas, Reardon, Johan, Swinnen, and David Zilberman. 2024. Structural Transformation and Economic Development: Insights from the Agri-Food Revolution. Mimeographed. Beegle, Kathleen, Aline, Coudouel, and Emma, Monsalvo. Eds. 2024. Realizing the Full Potential of Social Safety nets in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank Group: Washington D.C. Beegle, Kathleen, and Christiaensen, Luc. 2024. Eds. Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa. World Bank Group: Washington D.C. Carolan, Michael. 2024. Automated Agrifood Futures : Robotics, Labor and the Distributive Politics of Digital Agriculture. The Journal of Peasant Studies 47-1: 184-207. Cazzuffi, Chiara, Mariana, Pereira-Lopez, and Isidro, Soloaga. 2017. Local Poverty Reduction in Chile and Mexico: The Role of Food Manufacturing Growth. Food Policy 68: 160-185. CBS Sacramento. 2017. California Farmers Facing Labor Shortage Amid Immigration Changes. Retrieved from Youtube.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtE6qW4ugho. Charlton, Diane. 2024. Development of Agricultural Supply through Structural Changes in Labor Inputs (Working Paper). Retrieved from the UC Davis Farm Labor website: https://farmlabor.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk5936/files/inline-files/Diane Charlton; Ag Supply and Labor.pdf. 19
未来农业工作的一些思考(英文版)
