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,pot with drainage holes 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 Black welder 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 labor intensive 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 . Socioeconomic constraints can also stand in the way. Gulati et al. , for example, report low adoption of mechanical rice transplanters in India due to women’s weak bargaining position in the household decision making process. Mechanization is often associated with a reduced demand for labor. In theory, the impact of mechanization on labor demand and wages is unpredictable. This is because of two opposing effects: substitution and scale. Agricultural mechanization often occurs in response to rising rural wages, following the structural transformation of national economies towards industry and services, which draws labor out of the agricultural sector. As rural-urban migration expands, greater urban income earning opportunities become the main driver of agricultural wages. Higher wages induce farmers to mechanize and substitute capital for labor, as has now also been observed in Vietnam . Mechanization can also enable farmers to expand the scale of their production and increase their income. This can even happen without an original increase in wages, especially in land abundant countries. In fact, it can even induce an increase in real agricultural wages and hired labor , though the use of some intermediate labor-saving inputs like herbicides can mitigate this . An observed concurrence of rising agricultural wages with mechanization would suggest that wages induce farmers to adopt labor-saving methods, but when scale effects outweigh substitution effects, mechanization does not necessarily reduce rural employment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the evidence on the labor effects of mechanization is mixed. Kirui reports that in African countries where land expansion previously was limited, mechanization has led to scale effects through an increase in the amount of cropland cultivated . Scale effects have been accompanied by input intensification, higher productivity in maize and rice production, and greater labor use. However, in a number of countries, he also finds that mechanization displaces labor and induces off-farm work in some cases. Overall, where there are limits to agricultural extensification, for example, due to labor scarcity and rising wages, increasing labor productivity through technological change, including mechanization,large pot with drainage is the key to expanding food supplies.As technology changes, better educated and trained workers will have to be available to complement new advanced technologies.
Digitized agriculture and food systems also require a digitally-skilled workforce. In most cases, technologies and skill demands in poor countries are not as advanced as in high-income countries like the United States, Western Europe, or Japan. Nonetheless, studies from developing countries reinforce the need to train workers for more skill-intensive employment, not only on farms but throughout the food supply chain, as the agricultural transformation unfolds and digital agriculture takes hold . The COVID-19 crisis may present an opportunity to accelerate the digitization of the agri-food system, helping players across the globe in all nodes of the AFS become more efficient and informed while bridging the ruralurban divide by improving participation in modern markets . Solar energy and mini-grids also offer important opportunities to increase labor productivity in agri-food, especially now that the cost of productive use leveraging solar energy products, such as solar driven water pumps , cold storage, and agri-processing equipment, is falling, appliance efficiency is increasing, and new business models are emerging.The two main policy areas for promoting mini grid expansion and greater adoption of PULSE products are becoming financially sound, through charging cost recovery tariffs and/or targeted government subsidies and having regulations that specify what happens when the large grid reaches the mini-grid areas. On both fronts, many initiatives are ongoing . The adoption of these technologies could accelerate agricultural labor productivity growth, especially in Africa and South Asia; enable the development of delocalized agri-processing through refrigeration; and facilitate a more productive release of farm labor. In countries further along in the development process, the transition out of agricultural work is often accompanied by an inflow of immigrant workers, who help grease the wheels of farm labor markets by replacing native-born workers no longer willing to do farm work . Reliance upon immigrants has been a quintessential feature of the history of farm labor in the United States, particularly in the state of California, where two thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts and one third of vegetables are grown. It is also widespread in other high-income economies, as well as many not-so-high-income ones like Costa Rica , Dominican Republic , and South Africa . In recent decades, California farmers have relied overwhelmingly on unauthorized migrant workers from Mexico. However, rural Mexicans are also transitioning out of farm work as families become smaller, children become better educated, and non-farm employment expands . Workers have become less willing to travel far away from their homes to work on farms for extended periods of time . Yet, when farm workers are less mobile, even more are needed to meet seasonal labor demands.The declining supply of immigrant farm workers and their reduced mobility has induced local labor shortages. In some cases, this has prevented farmers from being able to harvest high-value fruit and vegetable crops, which have simply rotted away in the fields . Expansion of the U.S. H-2A agricultural guest worker program is unlikely to offer a long-term solution, as labor recruiters compete with Mexican farmers for a diminishing number of farm workers. Mexico is expanding its fruit and vegetable production, in part, by importing farm workers from Guatemala, while sending fewer farm workers to the United States. Increased immigration enforcement has further led to an exit of immigrants from local farm labor markets and pushed unauthorized Mexican migrants further into the desert to avoid apprehension, leading to an increase in the number of border-crossing deaths . These factors have exacerbated an already deteriorating situation for U.S. farmers and have led to a humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. These trends are not specific to California or Mexico. They have been observed across high-income countries and are evident in other middle-income countries. Agricultural guest worker programs are common on all continents, in countries with vastly different incomes, and they tend to be controversial everywhere. The extent to which middle- and high-income countries already rely on immigrant labor has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused governments across the world to enact emergency measures to relax mobility restrictions for agricultural workers to safeguard food production. Examples include the U.S. , Canada, Germany, and Spain , and Portugal and Italy . Migration can benefit migrant-receiving areas, beyond the farmers themselves, to the extent that migrants complement native workers, make agricultural operations more competitive, and stimulate the demand for goods and services. More importantly, from a development perspective, migration can benefit those who remain in the migrants ending economy . Migrant farm workers often earn much more than they could in their place of origin, and the income they remit to family members can help loosen constraints on household production activities, generate income spillovers for other households, and create other positive externalities.