The Exclusion of Farmers: an Historical Challenge for the International Labour Market

Résumé 0

Farming jobs are often considered as an adjustment variable that varies with changes in economic activity. As a tool for the sectoral and geographical mobility of “workers”, the job market is supposed to offer new opportunities to people leaving, or excluded from, agriculture. Unfortunately, because of a lack of regulation, the job market is flooded with workers. Most farmers no longer leave agriculture to respond to a job offer or a proposal for integration into another sector, but because of agricultural impoverishment that leads to exclusion. In continents where most people are farmers, those who are excluded from farming and are seeking paid work flock into cities that do not have the economic and industrial resources to offer them a job and provide them with an income. If nothing is done to change present trends, the ever-increasing integration of agricultural markets could lead 1.7 billion male and female farmers to leave agriculture within a few decades. If present employment needs and those linked to population growth prospects are added to that figure, the theoretical global need totals 3.8 billion new jobs by 2050! Such a prodigious figure is incompatible with observed job creation rates. Our aim is not to draw up a specific scenario but to show that the challenges would become insurmountable if present trends were to persist. Such a large pocket of poverty and exclusion would have considerable social, economic, and geopolitical repercussions. The interface between agriculture and market must be reconsidered so as to curb exclusion mechanisms and allow farmers to make a dignified living from their work. The future of agricultural employment, particularly in family farming, and its global consequences must be taken into account in the current WTO trade negotiation rounds.