The Dynamics of Hired Farm Labour

The Dynamics of Hired Farm Labour
Author: A. Vandeman
Publisher: CABI
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781845933371

Hired seasonal labour forms a significant part of the agricultural workforce in many countries. Key topics covered in this book include: changes in the hired farm workforce; area studies, and community impacts and responses; and the need for community services.

The Farm Labor Problem

The Farm Labor Problem
Author: J. Edward Taylor
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-11-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0128172681

The Farm Labor Problem: A Global Perspective explores the unique character of agricultural labor markets and the implications for food production, farm worker welfare and advocacy, and immigration policy. Agricultural labor markets differ from other labor markets in fundamental ways related to seasonality and uncertainty, and they evolve differently than other labor markets as economies develop. We weave economic analysis with the history of agricultural labor markets using data and real-world events. The farm labor history of California and the United States is particularly rich, so it plays a central role in the book, but the book has a global perspective ensuring its relevance to Europe and high-income Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide readers with the basics for understanding how farm labor markets work (labor in agricultural household models, farm labor supply and demand, spatial market equilibria); farm labor and immigration policy; farm labor organizing; farm employment and rural poverty; unionization and the United Farm Workers movement; the Fair Food Program as a new approach to collective bargaining; the declining immigrant farm labor supply; and what economic development in relatively low-income countries portends for the future of agriculture in the United States and other high-income countries. The book concludes with a chapter called "Robots in the Fields," which extrapolates current trends to a perhaps not-so-distant future. The Farm Labor Problem serves as both a guide to policy makers, farmworker advocates and international development organizations and as a textbook for students of agricultural economics and economics. Describes the unique character of agricultural labor markets providing consequential insights Contextualizes the economics of agricultural labor with a global perspective Examines the history of farm labor, immigration, policy and collective bargaining with a view to the future

Sustainable Intensification

Sustainable Intensification
Author: Jules N. Pretty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1136529276

Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.

Balancing Acts

Balancing Acts
Author: Demetrios G. Papademetriou
Publisher:
Total Pages: 64
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

The authors take a hard look at the complicated issue of perishable-crop agriculture and its workforce. Among their recommendations are ways to guarantee the agriculture sector a legal supply of labor in return for improved conditions for those workers.

Labor (mis?)measurement in agriculture

Labor (mis?)measurement in agriculture
Author: Ambler, Kate
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Livelihoods are changing rapidly in rural areas. Measuring and categorizing peoples’ labor activities in relation to the agricultural sector is important for understanding income earning opportunities and designing effective policy. Conventional data collection methods ask about individuals’ main work activities over the past year. Descriptions are recorded in the field, postcoded, and eventually categorized. This approach is costly to collect, fatiguing for respondents, and may create distortions. We show that a more direct approach, asking respondents to categorize their major work activities themselves, provides similar resulting data despite some caveats and lessons for best enumeration practices. We compare these main activities to a series of yes/no questions about participation in a set of specific work tasks. We find a 12% incidence of “missing” work, whereby individuals who reported participation in at least one but did not have any recorded major activities. Looking by sector of work, women and youth are disproportionately more likely to have agricultural contributions “missed,” while we find no corresponding bias in undercounting of non-agricultural work. Finally, we test the effect of randomly positioning the task-based questions before the listing of major activities but do not find significant effects on the number or type of activities reported.