1
Global Forum on Food and Nutrition - Discussion No 127
Youth – feeding the future: Addressing the challenges faced by rural youth aged 15 to 17 in
preparing for and accessing decent work.
Martine Dirven, 1 May 2016
Introduction
This is a contribution from the perspective of Latin America, based upon a recently published
electronic book: Juventud rural y empleo decente en América Latina.1
As the FSN Forum team states from the very beginning, there are relatively few studies and data on
the 15 to 17 age group. In Latin America, it is estimated that in 2015, there were 6,3 million young
rural people in this age group. In addition, 16% of the male workers in the primary agricultural sector
of this age group are urban residents and 11% of the female workers. They have been included in
graph 2, as many policies also (should) apply to them.
As can be observed in graph 1, around 2012, 75% of the rural 15 to 17 years old women and 44% of
the men were “inactive”, that is, they reported that the week before the Household Survey they did
not work for more than an hour in an activity that is considered “economic” as per the National
Accounts definitions. A relatively high percentage of them (87% of the men and 62% of the women)
reported being inactive because of studying full-time, while the reason given by another 34% of the
women and 5% of the men was their work at home: cooking, cleaning, washing, looking after young
siblings or older or sick family members, usually daily and for long hours each day. In practically all
age categories, including the 15 -17 years old, the percentage of rural people declaring being inactive
because of illness or disability is higher than among their urban peers. The rest of the inactive in the
15 to 17 age group -6% of the men and 2% of the women- are “real” NEET2, meaning that they
declared neither to study, work in an economic activity or looking actively to find work and,
additionally, did not work in household chores, nor had disabilities or an illness preventing them to
work. These are part of a potential hard-core group of youth in danger of falling -or already engagedin illicit activities (gangs, paramilitary groups, drugs, among others). These, together with the unpaid
family workers (in economic activities or household chores) plus those engaged in menial, ill-paid
and/or informal jobs, may find it difficult to build a decent work path in the future.
Of the total population in the 15 to 17 age group, 39% of men and 12% of women worked in the
primary agricultural sector3, while 14% of men and 11% of women worked in a large array of
activities outside the primary agricultural sector (trade, construction, tourism, agro-industry, personal
services, etc.), usually referred to as RNFE (rural non-farm4 employment). Some of them combine
work and study5. Finally, 3% of the young men and 2% of the young women reported being
unemployed, meaning that they had not worked but had been looking intensely to find work during
the week previous to the Survey.
Graph 1
1
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5570s.pdf
Not in Education, Employment, or Training (Ni-Ni in Spanish).
3
Including, as per the National Accounts and labour definitions: agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting and
recollection, as well as forestry and fishing in most countries.
4
The Spanish term is clearer: “empleo rural no agrícola” (ERNA) or non-agricultural rural employment, where
“rural” refers to the place of residence of the worker and not the place of work.
5
Some 15% of the 15 to 24 age group were both working and studying (national level figures based upon data
of ten countries around 2010). (Source: Viollaz, Mariana, 2014: “From the classroom to the workplace: Three
decades of evidence for Latin America”, ECLAC Review, No 112, p. 49).
2
2
Latin America (11 countries), 2012: Rural young people (15 to 29 years) occupied in agriculture, in
RNFE, inactive and unemployed, per age groups and sex (as a % of the total rural population in each
age group)
Women 25-29 years
19.8
Women 20-24 years
31.7
15.1
27.7
Women 18-19 years
12.6
Women 15-17 years
11.9 11.4 1.7
21.8
Men 25-29 years
50.5
Men 20-24 years
48.2
Men 18-19 years
3.5
61.0
75.0
41.2
13.9 2.9
20%
Agriculture
40%
RNFE
3.2 5.2
35.7
25.4
38.9
0%
52.9
4.7
44.2
Men 15-17 years
45.0
4.3
4.8 11.2
7.3
23.1
44.4
60%
Unemployed
80%
100%
Inactive
Source: Dirven (2016): Juventud rural y empleo decente en América Latina, Graph 5a, p. 19, based upon the
Household Survey data of Bolivia (2011), Brazil (2012), Colombia (2012), Costa Rica (2012), Dominican
Republic (2012), Ecuador (2012), El Salvador (2012), Honduras (2010), Mexico (2012), Panama (2010) and
Peru (2012).
Of the occupied (including the urban residents working in the agricultural sector), 41% of the men
and 36% of the women of 15 to 17 age group worked as wage workers and another 44% of the men
and 53% of the women worked as unpaid family workers. In contrast, the own-account workers in
this age group were relatively few (15% of the men and 11% of the women) (see graph 2).
Men
Wage-Workers
53.5
23.8
15-17
years
18-19
years
20-24
years
25-29
years
Total
15-29
years
Total
15-29
years
Women
Own-Account
22.5 21.9
27.9
20.4
31.6
23.7 23.8
16.6 31.1
52.9
46.7
Total
15-29
years
45.7
25-29
years
50.9
56.6
20-24
years
51.2
59.8
18-19
years
35.5 11.0
21.9 19.2
28.6 7.0
21.3 14.6
16.5 25.9
61.8
15-17
years
57.3
15.3
40.7
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
43.6
Graph 2
Latin America, (11 countries), 2012: Young people (15 to 29 years) per occupational category in
agriculture (rural and urban residents) and in RNFE, per age group and sex
Unpaid Family Workers
Men
and
Women
Employers
Source: Based upon Dirven (2016): Juventud rural y empleo decente en América Latina, Graph 11a, p. 31, and
the Household Survey data of Bolivia (2011), Brazil (2012), Colombia (2012), Costa Rica (2012), Dominican
Republic (2012), Ecuador (2012), El Salvador (2012), Honduras (2010), Mexico (2012), Panama (2010) and
Peru (2012).
Discussion
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Although there are many important issues, we will only tackle four here. The first one, are the efforts
to extend school-going versus the local employment possibilities. When objective 2 of the
Millennium Development Goals were discussed at the UN-Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean, full coverage of primary school was found to be little challenging, because this
goal had already been virtually reached in most countries of the region, including their rural areas.
Instead, other goals were suggested, including attaining full coverage of the secondary educational
cycle.6 Situations among countries are very different though. In Chile, for example, the twelve-year
cycle of education is compulsory as is its starting age at six. Thus, youngsters of the 15 to 17 age
group should be attending school. The Law permits them to work in light jobs and with parental
permission, as from 15 years of age and not more than 30 hours a week during the school year.7 On
the other hand, in Bolivia, the Union of Boy and Girl Workers of Bolivia (Unión de Niños y Niñas
Trabajadores de Bolivia, UNATSBO) played an important role in reducing the minimum legal
working age.8 The new Child and Adolescent Code of July 2014 permits children of 10 to 12 years
of age to work as own-account workers, with the authorization of the municipal Childhood´s
Ombudsman (Defensoría de la Niñez), and to work as wage workers with the authorization of their
parents and of the Ombudsman, except for 21 types of work considered too dangerous or demanding.
One of the problems (or blessings in this case?) is that several rural areas do not have an Ombudsman.
Most countries have social programmes aimed at improving the human capital of the poorest children
and youngsters (a high percentage of which are rural) through conditional transfers, one of the
conditions being remaining at school. Several of these programmes consider secondary school-going
and, some, finalizing the secondary cycle. The evaluations show that these programmes have been
successful at retaining children and youngsters for several additional years in the school system, but
there hardly any studies on the impact of the additional years of school attendance on their labour
prospects or on the local labour market. The scant evidence shows a lack of absorption capacity in
the local labour market.9 This in turn leads to migration and/or disappointed youths and their families,
or outright frustration with -possibly- ensuing disruptive behaviour, or entering into illegal activities.
Action therefore needs to be focused on invigorating the local (or national) (decent) employment
alternatives.
A second point is that decent work -in all or most of its aspects- is hard to come by in most rural
areas. In fact, inspired by the unmet basic needs approach (necesidades básicas insatisfechas, NBI,
in Spanish) we developed an unmet decent work table (empleo decente insatisfecho, EDI) with entries
for: contract, salary, risk at work, social security coverage (for health and pension), unionization,
social dialogue and working hours. Although information to fill the different entries is scant, the
results obtained are “unacceptable” for a region where most of the countries are classified in the
middle- to higher middle-income category. Thus -without differentiating for age nor sex- in the
region as a whole, around 80% of agricultural wage-workers do not have a contract10; 30% of the
occupied earn less than the minimum salary; 62% of wage workers are not covered by social security;
more than 90% are not unionized; 45 or more hours of work per week is the norm; and social dialogue
is virtually non-existing. For the same type of work, young people usually fare worse on all scores
than the rest of workers, and the youngest among them fare even worse. However, because a growing
6
http://www.cepal.org/MDG/noticias/paginas/2/40012/ODM_2.pdf, pages 7 to 10.
http://www.dt.gob.cl/1601/w3-article-95599.html accessed on 30 April 2016.
8
http://www.senado.bo/noticia/ accessed on 11 June 2014.
9
See CEPAL/OIT (2014): “Los programas de transferencias condicionadas y el mercado laboral”, Coyuntura
laboral en América Latina y el Caribe No 10 and, particularly, Rodríguez-Oreggia, Eduardo and Samuel Freije
(2011), “Long term impact of a cash-transfers program on labor outcomes of the rural youth”, CID Working
Paper, N° 230, Center for International Development (CID), Harvard University.
10
In some countries -Peru is an example-, a verbal agreement is accepted as lawful for agricultural workers
(comment made by Emilio Klein).
7
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percentage of young people work in formal RNFE, overall, they tend to score better than the rest of
the rural population on several elements of decent work. Although the foregoing is true for the 15 to
29 age group, it is less true for the 15 to 17 age group, because the younger are much more engaged
in unpaid family labour, but also in (often seasonal) agricultural wage work or low-paying and/or
informal non-farm work, all scoring low with respect to the decent work elements.
A third point is that, compared to the population overall, a higher percentage of the rural population
works in own-account or micro-enterprises (including farming). Therefore, an effort must be made
to adapt the concepts of decent work to that environment and to convince the people involved including policy makers, extension workers, etc.- that changes can and have to be made. Examples
of changes that could (or should) be made at the level of the family and microenterprises: listen to the
views of the rest of the family members or workers (a proxy for social dialogue), treat them well
(without verbal or physical violence), envisage giving unpaid family members a salary for the hours
worked and a participation for innovative ideas (with good results), separate a plot of land or animals
for the independent work of grown-up children, etc.. Although these issues are usually considered to
pertain to the family domain, they are also of public interest, in that young people are less likely to
remain in their locality or in family farming if conditions are worse than they could be. Worldwide
and in Latin America there are interesting experiences of awareness-raising on child-labour that could
be used as an inspiration for increasing decent work conditions in rural family- or microenterprises.
Uruguay has organized a set of workshops with farmer families to discuss the ageing of farmers and
the possibilities of co-working, co-managing, early retirement cum inheritance and/or progressive
transfer of activities and responsibilities to grown-up children (some within the 15-17 age group, but
mostly older). In countries with lots of too-small-to-be-divided farms and little possibilities to absorb
the rural young in the rural or urban labour markets, schemes for accessing fiscal or other land should
be envisaged. Otherwise, instead of feeding the future with food, the young may well feed the future
(or the present) with unrest.
One last point: the bias of policies and programmes, possibly in response to the demands of civil
society (including rural youth organizations) toward own-account or microenterprise
entrepreneurship (agricultural or RNFE) while the statistics clearly show that those groups are a
minority. This bias leads to insufficient efforts to improve wage workers´ conditions. In most
countries there is no lack of adequate Laws and norms, but it is their enforcement which is lacking
and thus, the main requirement.11 As to the already mentioned intra-family working relations,
conditions and decisions: when “pushed”, adolescent and young adult children of small farmers
usually come to admit that they feel that their families consider them as cheap labour with no say in
the family business. This is hardly a good start to retain them on the family farm, in agriculture or in
their locality. Low incomes, high risks, working for long hours and putting up with wind and weather,
no free days nor holydays, etc., add to the lack of attractiveness of agriculture. In fact, different
workshops with rural youth interested in agriculture12 point to the same conclusions: these youths are
an enthusiastic minority, with innovative ideas, very much oriented toward environmental concerns,
and they want to work and live on the land, but differently from their parents, with less hard work,
less risks and higher incomes, and … connected to information and communication technologies
(ICTs)!
11
See FAO/ECLAC/ILO (2010 and 2012): Políticas de mercado de trabajo y pobreza rural, FAO, Santiago
de Chile.
12
With IFAD/Land Coalition and Procasur with young people from Latin America in April 2016; with the
Ministry of Agricuture (INDAP) of Chile, FAO and other partners with chilean youth in 2015; with CONTAG,
the brazilian labour union for agricultural workers, and young people from several countries of the region,
although most came from Brazil, in October 2013, etc.