Social Injustice in the Global Food Chain for Hired Agricultural Workers and Smallholder Farmers

Background notes and reading - Peter Hurst

Introduction, pp. 1-3

Part A: Hired agricultural workers, pp 4-31

Part B: Smallholder farmers, pp 32-44

------

Introduction

Everyday, through the global food chain, agriculture feeds a world population of over 6 billion, a figure which is rapidly increasing. Crop, livestock and aquacultural products are produced by hired or waged agricultural workers and self-employed farmers (the vast majority of them smallholders) in national and international supply and value chains. Agricultural workers and farmers also produce bulk agricultural commodities such as cotton, rubbers, oils and starches as the raw materials for a wide range of industrial processes and end products; and biofuels - from plough to plate, from field to fork!

Yet these hired agricultural workers and smallholder farmers who feed the world on a daily basis and produce its agricultural commodities remain the largest and most exploited and vulnerable group of workers on the planet who do not have equivalent standards and conditions to workers in industry, services, and commerce. They and their families form the core of the world’s chronic poor - 2.1 billion people live in rural areas in absolute poverty below a 2 USD a day threshold.[1]

It is one of the great social injustices - and one that urgently needs remedying - that hired agricultural workers and smallholder farmers are often least able to feed, clothe and house themselves and their families, and to send their children to school.

Hired agricultural workers and smallholder farmers do far more than just help produce the world's food, fibres, and biofuels. They help:

•ensure world food security, and nutritious food;

• ensure food safety for consumers;

•promote sustainable agriculture and rural development;

•bring about agricultural growth and change;

•protect the environment (air, soil and water quality) and mitigate the impacts of climate change;

•promote the interests of rural communities;

•promote rural education, health, and rural infrastructure.

Yet, for these rural poor, the right to food and food security, and other basic human rights and standards such as decent work, living wages, fair prices, sustainable livelihoods,social protection, good education and health care remain expectations, not reality.

Agriculture is the mainstay of most rural economies and the main source of income, wages, employment, and livelihoods.[2][3]Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 86% of rural people. The global agricultural workforce is estimated to vary between just over 1 billion[4] to 1.3 billion agricultural workers - 30-40% of whom are ‘waged/hired`(300-400 million plus workers)[5] - and farmers, 85% of whom are smallholders.[6]Even though the agricultural workforce as a whole is shrinking as more and more small-scale farmers leave the land, the number of hired agricultural workers in employment is growing in absolute and relative terms in most regions of the world, especially women agricultural workers in Africa and Asia, and in new crop sub-sectors such as horticulture and cut flowers.

Worldwide, hired agricultural workers and smallholder farmers are denied basic human rights, national labour laws do not adequately protect them, their employment or land tenure is often precarious, wages and incomes are low, hours of work are long and continuous, and workplaces dangerous; and temporary, migrant, and landless workers face particular difficulties. The trade/labor unions that represent and organise hired workers and the smallholder farmer associations are also often poor and lack resources.

Employment and income problems have increased as the impact of globalization, and corporate concentration in agribusiness, have led to less and less permanent labour, more and outsourced labour, more migrant labour, increased use of contract labour, and lower prices for farmers, amongst other things. New phenomenon such as land grabs have increased the vulnerability of these categories of workers.

Major changes are taking place in agricultural and rural settings worldwide. The increase of value chains associated with agribusiness and agroindustry, the rapid expansion of biofuels production and its uncertain impact on employment and the use of land, the also rapidly growing phenomenon of large land-based investments, as well as climate change, are transforming rural production and labour systems. The food price crisis, as well as increasing food price volatility concerns, and the global financial and economic crisis are adding pressure on rural economies and communities. All these new challenges are drawing greater attention to agriculture and rural areas.[7] Food systems are currently undergoing deep transformations. The renewed interest in agriculture, from both the public and the private sector, led to foreign direct investment in agriculture rising from an average of USD 600 million annually in the 1990s, to an average of USD 3 billion in 2005–2007.[8]

As agricultural labour is increasingly casualised, as contract farming develops, and as smallholder farmers increasingly work on farms or plantations to supplement their basic incomes, the distinction between hired workers and farmers is breaking down. The blurring of the distinctions between these different categories often leads to situations in which the legal framework applicable to the relationship between the food producer and the food buyer is difficult to determine, and in which the rights and obligations of the parties are unclear.[9] Yet this blurring also offers opportunities to develop cooperation and alliances between these two groups.

PART A:

HIRED AGRICULTURAL WORKERS

Hired agricultural workers: Who are we talking about?

Hired or waged or employed agricultural workers are the women and men who labour in the crop fields, orchards, glasshouses, livestock and aquacultural units, and primary processing facilities to produce the world's food, fibres, and biofuels.[10] They are at the heart of global food chain - from plough to plate, from field to fork! They are hired workers because they do not own or rent the land on which they work nor the tools and equipment they use, and so are a group distinct from farmers.

Hired or waged or employed agricultural workers (the term “hired agricultural workers” will be used from now on) do not form a homogenous group. Their terms and conditions of employment and vary tremendously, creating diverse, and sometimes overlapping, categories. “Occupations” in this context can be difficult to distinguish and categorise.[11] Lack of accurate data, especially as national employment registration/recording schemes for waged agricultural workers are often weak or absent, hinders efforts to raise the economic and social conditions of these workers.

Hired agricultural workers are employed on everything from highly capitalised and mechanised plantations[12] and large scale farms to smallholder, family farms.

Hired agricultural workers work for some kind of 'wage', whether cash payment, in-kind payment, or a combination of these. Agricultural “wages” are often low, sometimes very low. Low wages, often combined with under-employment where workers’ employment is casual and they don’t have enough work, means they don’t earn enough to feed themselves and their families.

Hired workers work within an “employment relationship”,[13] employer-employee (though often without a formal or written contract) - with either a farmer, or farming or plantation company (national or transnational corporations), or labour contractor or sub-contractor (gangmasters). “Employment relationships” are often unclear due to, for example, lack of written employment contracts or being hired by labour contractors. Such factors create a “grey area” around the employer’s responsibilities to her/his workers and can contribute to a disregard for labour legislation.

Some hired workers are permanently employed, usually working for wages on medium- to large-sized farms, and on plantations. Plantation workers, for example, in large-scale, commercial agricultural enterprises in tropical and sub-tropical regions - where industrial methods are applied to crop production and primary processing - produce everything from short-rotation crops such as vegetables and salad crops, pineapples and other fruits, cut flowers, cotton, and sugar cane, to long-term tree crops such as bananas, coffee, nuts, rubber, tea, and oil palm.[14]

A growing trend, however, is for large commercial plantations and farming corporations to reduce their permanent workforces by relying on labour contractors to supply the labour needed and by outsourcing their production, as discussed more fully in Part 2. The result of these contracting and outsourcing practices is that the actual employer has no formal relationship with the worker.

Other hired workers are seasonal, casual, temporary or daily agricultural workers, including migrant workers and indigenous workers. They often work as “piece rate” paid labour on medium-sized and large farms and plantations, and even on smallholder farms. (In many parts of the world there is an active labour market in smallholder farm sectors). Many of these workers work under “precarious conditions of employment”. Working, for example, without labour contracts, where employment is irregular, under poor health and safety conditions, lacking medical insurance, social security cover and other forms of social protection such as maternity leave[15].

The agricultural workforce is already unique in terms of the large numbers of women farmers. But an important global trend in the hired workforce is an increase in the share of women in agricultural employment, especially in Africa and Asia, and particularly in new crop sub-sectors such as horticulture and cut flowers. For example, they constitute 40% of the workforce in Latin America and the Caribbean and 20-30% generally.[16] This feminisation of the agricultural workforce also means that problems such as lack of equal pay, poor maternity leave, sexual harassment and so on are on the increase.

Globally, another important trend is the millions of migrant hired workers in agriculture working outside their home countries. The production and processing of many food crops and livestock products have become dependent on migrant workers, whether from different regions of a country, or hired from abroad, who now constitute the majority of agricultural workers in some regions or countries. Whilst recognizing that seasonal migration can be welfare enhancing, the International Labour Organization (ILO )observes that, “Migrant workers in agriculture often experience discriminatory treatment on the job and face strong disadvantages in terms of pay, social protection, housing and medical care”.[17] In some countries, migrant workers in agriculture and fishing are criminally exploited under conditions of forced labour/slavery and trafficking.

Also, agricultural workers often live where they work. The farm or plantation is also the home for them and their families. As a result, they and their families can be exposed to extra problems such as pesticide contamination from polluted drinking water, spray drift, and residues in farm food.

Rural labour markets are generally weak with poor governance and institutions, including weak or non-existent labour inspection in many countries unable to stop abuses. Weak rural labour markets are characterised by large (monopsonistic) employers, oversupply of labour, poor transport and communications infrastructure restricting movement of labour to stronger markets. As a result, wages in rural areas remain depressed and people trapped in poverty.[18]

Trade/labor union leaders - and sometimes their families - organising agricultural workers are regularly murdered, imprisoned, or regularly face intimidation and death threats. On 21.03.2013 in Mato Grosso state, Brazil, a hired killer entered the office of the Rural Workers Union in Bela Vista Municipality, and shot dead the union’s president, Eugênio Benites, his wife and son.[19] Commenting on the tragic murders, the Secretary of Agrarian Policy of the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), stated that whilst, “Normally assassination of trade union leaders was not common in Mato Grosso, threats and intimidation by landowners and companies happened very frequently.” In Guatemala, four members of a banana workers’ trade union – defenders of human rights – were murdered in 2012 alone.[20]

Yet agricultural workers remain largely invisible to policy-makers and decision-makers in governments, agricultural and rural development agencies, intergovernmental organisations, science and research institutions, agricultural banks and credit institutions as well as to many civil society organisations and groups. They are hardly ever mentioned in United Nations documentation outside of the International Labour Organization (ILO).If they are never mentioned:

How can their basic human rights be ensured?

How can their needs as part of the core rural poor be assessed and programmes to eradicate their poverty and hunger, and ensure the right to food be developed?

How can their contributions actual and potential to global human rights promotion, global justice, poverty reduction, ensuring the right to food, world food security and food safety, sustainable agriculture and rural development, environmental protection, education and health - to name but a few - be assessed and strengthened?

The right to food and agricultural workers

One of the new rights to emerge out of, or be strengthened by, the global food crises in 2008 et al is “The right to adequate food which is realized ‘when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement. The right to adequate food shall therefore not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with a minimum package of calories, proteins and other specific nutrients.” [21][22]

The right to food for hired agricultural workers and their families remains weak, and so it needs urgently strengthening through measures such as legal protection, correcting power imbalances in the global food chain, and ensuring a living wage and so on.

Economic and social deficits faced by hired agricultural workers

Hired agricultural workers face many economic and social gaps which include:

Low wages that do not meet basic household and educational needs

As agricultural wages tend to be low, often very low, and often below the national minimum wage, many agricultural workers live below the poverty line. Low wages often force them to borrow money (often at exorbitantly high rates of interest) to feed their families and send their children to school, building up debts as a result. Non-payment or deferred payment of wages, inappropriate deductions from wage packets and other abusive practices deepen their poverty. Wage fixing is one of the most contentious issues in agriculture, largely due to the lack of collective bargaining mechanisms. The wage gap between men and women workers in rural areas also remains a key issue.[23]

•Malawi: agricultural workers and the right to food through a living wage. Following a visit to Malawi in July 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food stated that with the minimum wage currently fixed at Malawian Kwacha (MWK) 371 per day (US$ 1.12), the country has one of the lowest national minimum wages worldwide. It is estimated that the requirements to cover the food basket of an average household is above MWK 58,000 per month (1,900 per day). Addressing the government, employers and development partners alike, the Special Rapporteur stated that, “Steps should gradually but immediately be taken to adapt the national minimum wage to a ‘living wage’, a wage that “provides an income allowing workers to support themselves and their families”, as required under articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.”[24]

•Malawi tea plantation workers: 2008 research by the Malawi Centre for Advice, Research and Education on Rights and SOMO, a Dutch NGO found very low wages, set by the Tea Association of Malawi Limited without any representation from the plantation workers’ union.[25] Specifically, the:

•Basic wage for timework for all daily rated employees was US$ 0.72, Malawian Kwacha (MWK) 101.00) per day;

•Plucking rate seasonal and casual worker was as low as MWK2.29 per kg of green leaf plucked;

•Minimum wage in tea estates was 25 US$ (Mk 3500) and maximum was 35.7 US$ (MWK 5000) per month;

•Workers on temporary employment got 0.72 US$ (MWK101.00) per day, about 21.64 US$ (MWK 3030) per month.

•The same report stated, “The Malawian government must also share the blame for enacting labour registration that put minimum wage as low as 0.39 US$ a day. Hence the members of Tea Association only utilise this loophole and nobody can take them to task.”

•India tea plantation workers: According to a 2103 article in The Observer newspaper UK, every tea plantation in Assam, India pays the same wages. Every leaf of every box of Assam tea sold by Tetley and Lipton and Twinings and the supermarket own brands – Asda, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury's and the rest – is picked by workers who earn a basic 12p UK an hour. (US 0.18 cents)