A Glaring Deficit: Decent Work in the Agricultural and Food Sectors
Whether wages, security or social protection are at issue: the work environment can be as diverse as methods of production. Findings from Ghana demonstrate where improvements can be implemented.
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The agrifood sector provides employment for a large share of the global population. It is estimated that approximately 1.2 billion people worldwide are employed in this sector, and that more than 3.8 billion people live in households linked to agrifood sector based livelihoods (Davis et al., 2023). (1) However, the sector is widely known for its lack of decent jobs (Meemken et al., 2025).
At a time when technological innovations and climate pressures are reshaping this sector in an increasingly globalised and volatile world marked by rising inequalities, the issue of decent work has never been more pressing. To better understand the current deficits in decent work, it is necessary to examine how work is organized and how different agrifood models shape labour conditions.
Reframing the concept of decent work
The concept of decent work was institutionalised by the ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalisation in 2008. The ILO defines decent work as ‘productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity’. The concept is based on four pillars:
1) access to productive and adequately remunerated work;
2) rights at work that ensure safety and health;
3) access to social protection that protects workers from life's risks;
4) giving people the freedom to express their rights through social dialogue.
As the concept of decent work was initially developed in the context of formal wage employment, its application to the agrifood sector, where family labour, informality, and diverse contractual arrangements prevail (Contzen et al., 2025), is limited.
To make the concept meaningful in agrifood systems, it is necessary to move beyond standard definitions. We need to consider the various categories of workers and their tasks, as well as work organisations, that vary greatly across different segments of the agrifood sector (Girard et al., 2025).
These labourers work alone or in groups, in different workplaces with various skill sets. They perform tasks that vary in terms of intensity, remuneration, flexibility, occupational safety or exposure to health risks. This calls for the decent work indicators to be adapted for different sectors, to reflect the variety of agrifood systems, including those involving informal, family-based, and temporary work.
Decent Work - some core challenges
The first major challenge is the persistent inequality in remuneration. In a sector where family labour is directly tied to farm income, decent work cannot be separated from the issues of variable agricultural prices and the distribution of value along the value chain. Power relations within value chains and modes of integration into global markets all influence who captures value. However, higher farm or value chain business income does not necessarily lead to better pay for all workers. The wide diversity of employment statuses and workers - including women, family workers, permanent employees, daily workers, pieceworkers and sharecroppers - creates highly uneven remunerative arrangements that often disadvantage the most vulnerable (Oya & Pontara, 2015).
A second challenge concerns occupational safety and health and working environment (OSHE), an issue that is frequently overlooked. Evidence shows that work-related accidents in agriculture occur far more often than in other sectors, with particularly severe incidents occurring in the Global South disproportionately affecting women (Sherrer 2019). The limited training of farmers and agricultural workers further exacerbates their exposure to machinery- and pesticide-related hazards. Labour drudgery remains a central challenge: much agricultural work is still manual, exposing workers to physical strain.
While mechanisation can reduce drudgery, ease labour bottlenecks and increase cultivated areas, it also raises questions about who absorbs additional workload resulting from increased farm areas and how to avoid excessive labour displacement. This is a particular concern in Africa, where the sector must continue to create jobs for large numbers of young people entering the labour market in rural areas.
A third challenge is the informality of productive structures. Many farms and agrifood enterprises lack a recognised legal status, meaning they fall outside formal labour law. This leaves workers without enforceable rights, social protection, or professional recognition. Informality also weakens workers’ collective power, with very few belonging to unions or collective bargaining structures. In the Global South, diverse and multi-activity livelihood strategies create heterogeneous interests among workers and farmers, which reinforces low unionisation and limits the capacity to defend shared collective interests (Meemken et al., 2025).
A final challenge is the scarcity of reliable and disaggregated data on agricultural employment. While the issue of vulnerable employment in agrifood systems is widely acknowledged, the available indicators are limited and are rarely disaggregated by worker category (Oya, 2016). This lack of data severely limits the ability of governments to design effective policies for improving job quality. Initiatives such as Ghana’s JobAgri (2) project are helping to address this issue.
Insights from Ghana
JobAgri is generating important evidence of the working conditions in Ghana’s agrifood sector. Over the past year, the project has conducted large-scale data collection across the Bono East region - surveying 960 farming households, 30 corporate farms, 664 businesses in the maize value-chain and 1,200 workers. This region, marked by highly diverse farming systems and value-chain structures, provides a valuable insight into the reality of decent work on the ground.
A first clear insight from early findings is that ‘decent work’ does not mean the same thing for all workers. Along the maize value chain, one of the most common tasks is bag handling, which is still performed manually by male casual labourers. While the number of jobs may look favourable, the physical strain and drudgery of lifting heavy bags raises serious questions about job quality with regard to occupational safety and health and working environment.
On farms, the distribution of tasks reveals sharp contrasts in exposure to risks (Figure 1). For example, yam mounding is done exclusively by men, who are mostly casual day or task workers. This labour-intensive activity requires awkward postures that frequently result in back injuries. Planting, usually performed by both men and women family members, carries fewer risks. By contrast, chemical weeding exposes both family workers and casual labourers, who are mostly men, to significant health hazards linked to the use of agrochemicals. Skin burns caused by pesticides are common.
Figure 1: Labour division acccording to different tasks
Source: JobAgri Survey
Beyond specific tasks, farming work is characterised by widespread exposure to environmental risks. According to the JobAgri survey, around 90 percent of workers are affected by heat, and 80 percent by dust. Noise and heavy loads are less common in field production but surge in other segments of the maize value chain. Another often overlooked and rarely discussed aspect of working conditions is the stress reported by many farm managers.
One recurring finding is the significant inequality between permanent and casual workers. Among those who experienced a work-related accident or health problem in the past year, employers covered the medical expenses of 68 percent of permanent workers - but for only 29 percent of casual workers. Those facing the highest risks are the least protected.
Gender gaps tell a similar story. Women workers are the most vulnerable group among casual workers, earning on average 42 percent less than men. This gap varies sharply depending on the crop and task. For example, in maize production, women earn 68 percent less than men for planting, but the gap narrows to around 10 percent during harvesting. Reducing gender inequality in rural labour markets therefore requires task- and crop-specific policies, rather than uniform interventions.
It’s about more than just counting jobs
These findings underscore that decent work in the agrifood sector depends on how farmers and workers are organised, what they do, their work conditions, the technologies they use, and the market structures they are facing. Task allocation is influenced by farm size, technical choices, and the extent to which farms are integrated into value chains. In short, improving job quality cannot be separated from broader debates on the type of agrifood model that Ghana wants to promote.
In this context, meaningful progress requires addressing both technology and training. Heavy-load handling is widespread across the sector and can be partially mechanised, but reducing physical strain also depends on basic training for workers and employers. Reducing herbicide use, a major concern in the region, requires providing farmers with viable alternatives and raising awareness of the health risks linked to agrochemicals.
Transforming agrifood jobs in Ghana is not just about counting jobs. It requires an understanding of the work involved, while also considering the environmental sustainability and climate resilience of these systems. Ultimately, improving job quality in agrifood systems requires interventions that are technically appropriate, institutionally embedded and socially inclusive. A tested pathway to making the agrifood sector a source of decent work and sustainable livelihoods is to combine social dialogue, rights-based frameworks, and evidence-based policy design.
* All authors of this article:
Footnotes:
(1) The situation varies from continent to continent. The largest number of people employed in the agrifood sector (792 million) is in Asia, followed by Africa (286 million), the Americas (104 million) and Europe (46 million). On the other hand, the agrifood sector represents 53 percent of total employment in Africa and 35 percent in Asia, with agriculture making up the largest part of the sector in both regions (48 percent and 29 percent, respectively).
(2) JobAgri is project funded by BMZ and coordinated by ILO. CIRAD and the Institute For Social, Statistical and Economic Research at the University of Ghana are in charge of the data collection.
References:
Contzen, S., Santhanam-Martin, M., Beecher, M., Hostiou, N., & Nettle, R. (2025). Revisiting the concept of ‘decent work’ for agriculture. Journal of Rural Studies, 120, 103872. doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103872
Davis, B., Mane, E., & Gurbuzer, L. Y. (2023). Estimating global and country-level employment in agrifood systems. FAO. doi.org/10.4060/cc4337en
Girard, P., Hostiou, N., Diallo, I., & Dedieu, B. (2025). Le travail décent en agriculture: L’appréhender au prisme de l’organisation familiale du travail et des modèles productifs en Afrique (Dialogues de Politiques Publiques). AFD.
Meemken, E., Aremu, O., Fabry, A., Heepen, C., Illien, P., Kammer, M., & Laitha, A. (2025). Policy for Decent Work in Agriculture. Agricultural Economics, e70009. doi.org/10.1111/agec.70009
Oya, C. (2016). Decent work indicators for agriculture and rural areas: Conceptual issues, data collection challenges and possible areas for improvement. 38. doi.org/10.1481/icasVII.2016.a05b
Oya, C., & Pontara, N. (2015). Understanding rural wage employment in developing countries. In Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries: Theory, Evidence, and Policy (pp. 1–36). Taylor & Francis. books.google.co.za/books
Scherrer, C., & Radon, K. (2019). Occupational Safety and Health Challenges in Southern Agriculture: Vol. Volume 15 (Christoph Scherrer). Rainer Hampp Verlag. kobra.uni-kassel.de/items/4da69f12-d2e9-4e22-a835-e08e24316e54
