Policy for Decent Work in Agriculture

Eva‐Marie Meemken, Olayinka Aremu, Anna Fabry, Celestina Heepen, Patrick Illien, Marie Kammer and Andrew Laitha

Agricultural Economics, 2025, vol. 56, issue 3, 401-418

Abstract: The agricultural sector offers employment for a large share (⅛) of the global population, yet there are various employment challenges, including precarious working conditions and labor market frictions, contributing to labor shortages in some—and unemployment in other—regions. It remains unclear which policy tools are best suited to address these challenges as the extant evidence is scattered, limited, and lacks a comprehensive overview of policy options. Here, we fill this gap by offering the first literature review on this topic, unraveling the complexity of employment challenges, providing an overview of policy tools, and proposing a policy and research agenda. Our overview shows that a bundle of coherent, national, and international policies is needed to address the interconnected and global nature of employment challenges in agriculture. Many such tools are available but few of them have been rigorously evaluated, often because suitable data are lacking. Our contribution is timely, given the surge in public interest in social sustainability, the proliferation of policies for decent work in agriculture, and limited research guiding these efforts.

Date: 2025
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