The agricultural population of the world has witnessed a steady but low rate of growth during the 1990s. While the world agricultural population in the world in 1990 was approximately 2,438.283 million, by 2001 it had reached 2,575.340 million, growing at a measly average of around 0.50 per cent a year. However, almost all countries in the developed world, and countries in Latin America have experienced a drop in the number of people in agriculture during the 1990s. The increase in the size of the agricultural population of the world is because of the increase in the same in developing countries in Africa and Asia.

The agricultural population in South Asia grew at 1.01 per cent a year between 1990 and 2001. The Indian agricultural workforce grew annually at 0.94 per cent, lower than the growth of the same in all South Asian countries taken together, but higher than the 0.54 per cent at which the agricultural workforce grew in all Asian developing countries taken together.

Even in countries where the growth of agricultural population has been positive, it has mostly lagged way behind the rate of growth of the total population of the concerned countries, or even when taking only the rural population under consideration. For example, the population of India grew at 1.95 per cent a year between 1991 and 2001, while the country's rural population has been growing at around 1.67 per cent per annum during this decade. The Latin American population grew at an annual average of 1.62 per cent during the 1990s, while the rural population of the region actually fell at 0.01 per cent a year during the same period. The agricultural population fell faster, at 0.79 per cent a year during this decade.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been one region where the agricultural workforce, while growing at a rate less than that at which the total population grew, increased faster than the rate of growth of the region's rural population. However many countries in different parts of the world witnessed increased migration from rural areas to the cities as is evident from a fall in the rural population while the total population continued to increase. Brazil in Latin America has been a classic example. Brazil's total population grew at 1.39 per cent a year between 1991 and 2001. But the country witnessed increased migration from rural areas to the cities as is evident from the decline in Brazil's rural population at 1.56 per cent per annum during this decade. The decline in the country's agricultural population however outpaced the decline in its rural population during the 1990s.

We will now try to look at what might have been the possible reasons behind the way in which the agricultural population in the different regions and countries under observation have grown (or shrunk) during the 1990s. Agricultural policy worldwide has failed to distinguish between the different type of farmers living under different agro-climatic zones and their specific needs. Policymakers have always talked of a ‘farming community'; while in reality there is not one farming community but several of them. As Pushpa Surendra has found out in India, the small farmer may only be a tenant of another landowner or may have leased a plot for cultivation. Most farmers' organizations are dominated by those growing irrigated crops and using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These organizations are preoccupied with wresting concessions from their governments, in the form of free water and electricity, and subsidies of several kinds, all of which serve the interests of large and surplus-generating farmers[1].

In the absence of organizations that represent the interests of the small farmer government policies neglect the needs of those marginalized. The number of jobs in the agricultural sector is falling steadily. This has been an important and continuing trend. Many would see this as a sign of development, one in which an increasing proportion of the population is moving away from agriculture without affecting productivity in agriculture because of the prevalence of disguised unemployment in agriculture. However, available data indicate otherwise. In the European Union small farms are being bought out and consolidated into larger farms. Throughout the EU, the reduction in the number of farms has entailed lay-offs of paid workers. A joint analysis of the proportion of part-time jobs and the proportion of farmers engaged in a non-agricultural gainful activity highlights the special situation in the southern European countries in particular. While there is a high level of part-time employment, very few farmers are engaged in a non-agricultural gainful activity[2].

In Slovakia while agricultural employment fell sharply, overall employment also moved in the same direction, though the fall was less than that of employment in agriculture. So the hope that declining agricultural employment is necessarily a sign of progress (and the expectation that this will rid the agricultural sector from disguised unemployment and those released will be absorbed in the non-agricultural sector) cannot be sustained from empirical evidence. The number of people employed in agriculture in Slovakia dropped by more than 50% between 1989 and 2000, decreasing at an average rate of 6.1% per year (compared to 1.8% per year between 1960-89). The total number of people employed in Slovakia fell by about a quarter during the same period.

Changes in Employment: Total Employed and Employed in Agriculture in Slovakia

Source: See Footnote [3]

The condition of the agricultural population in India isn't any better either. As pointed out by Jayati Ghosh, there is evidence of very significant falls in employment growth in agriculture by the usual status definition, which refers to what a person usually does over the year in question, both in terms of principal activity and principal plus subsidiary activities. The decline in growth of agricultural employment in India has been even drastic if one considers the weekly and daily status definitions. This implies that even those who saw themselves as usually employed, had difficulties in getting jobs on a weekly or daily basic [4] [5].

However, even in India the fall in growth of agricultural employment has not been accompanied by a rise in employment opportunities in the non-agricultural sector. On the contrary withdrawal of the state and reduction in state expenditure have made it difficult for the labour declared surplus in agriculture to find alternative employment. In 1987-88, about 60% of the regular non-agricultural employees in rural areas were employed by the government, often in employment-generating programmes, which created almost 80% of the increments in such regular jobs during the 1980s. The economic reforms package of the 1990s has seen declines in central government revenue expenditure on rural development, substantial declines in public infrastructure and energy investments which affect the rural areas, reduced transfers to state governments which have been facing a major financial crunch and have therefore been forced to cut back their own spending, particularly on social expenditure, and financial liberalisation measures which have effectively reduced the availability of rural credit and raised input costs. These have been among several measures that have affected the rural population, and the small and marginal farmers in particular, adversely since liberalisation.

In regions where agricultural incomes have crossed a minimum threshold, further increases in agricultural output are accompanied by labour displacement rather than greater labour absorption. Increased concentration of land holdings, an increase in large landowners leasing in plots owned by small and marginal farmers, and rising landlessness have been salient features of this process. And not all of this displaced labour can be considered to be disguisedly unemployed since small/marginal cultivators also use other non-land inputs more intensively suggests that they would use this additional labour to increase per hectare productivity.

The falling rate of growth of agricultural employment in India cannot be explained entirely by opportunities in the non-agricultural sector, or by growing participation in education. The macroeconomic strategy needs to be reoriented towards the basic goal of increasing productive employment opportunities in the rural areas [6].

Even as China attempts to move people out of agriculture, it remains an onerous task for the country's policymakers to meet the target as population growth keeps adding more people to the rural labour force each year. The creation of 57 million rural non-farm jobs during the 1990s decreased farm employment by only 5 million from 1990 to 2000. The aging of the rural labour force presents another obstacle to non-farm job growth because older persons are less likely to enter off-farm employment than younger persons[7].

D.G. Johnson has estimated that China would need to create 15 million jobs per year over the next 30 years to reduce its farm employment from the current 47 per cent to 10 percent of the labour force (about the level of South Korea and Taiwan), nearly three times the annual average of 5.9 million workers per year that China has been transferring from agricultural to non-agricultural activities from 1978 to 2000, according to the country's National Bureau of Statistics. Even for a more realistic 20 per cent share for the agricultural labour force (similar to that of Malaysia) China would require to accelerate job growth over current rates[8].The target has become even more difficult as the rural township and village enterprises (TVEs) that had been absorbing much farm labour till the mid 1990s have now reduced hiring in an attempt to raise productivity and workforce quality. TVE employment grew by 42 million during the first half of the 1990s but fell by 7 million between 1996 and 2000.

As should be evident from the discussion so far, the growth rate of rural labour force has been greater than the growth rate of agricultural employment across the world during the 1990s. However this trend had been prevalent even before 1990. However, state intervention often prevented any downward tendency in agricultural wages which might have resulted from this growth-rate gaps. In fact in countries like India real agricultural wages rose through the 1970s and 1980s, and this was one of the main reasons for the reduction of rural poverty, and much of this rise can be attributed to the expansion of non-agricultural employment, courtesy government sponsored employment-generating programmes[9].But now, with increasing agricultural prices, falling wages in the unorganized sector, and a contraction in government-sponsored non-agricultural employment in rural areas the agricultural population is going to be greatly impoverished.

In India there was a very large increase in expenditure on the rural sector by the State and Central governments during the 1980s. Nearly 60 per cent of all new government jobs created accrued to rural areas during the decade and accounted for 80 per cent of the new regular jobs created in the countryside. More than one-fifth of all casual labour days spent on non-agricultural activity in the late 1980s in rural India were on public works programmes of the government. This was critical in increasing both access to lean-season incomes and boosting the bargaining power of rural labour[10].However, spending in rural areas as a share of gross domestic product has fallen steadily during the 1990s, and is currently an extremely small figure, about 2 per cent.

Financial liberalisation measures, which include a reduction in priority sector lending by banks, have effectively reduced the availability of rural credit, and thus reduced farm investment, especially by smaller farmers. In the absence of credit availability many small and marginal farmers are finding it impossible to pay for the necessary inputs and are being forced to lease out their plots to rich farmers. This is happening at a time when research is increasingly pointing towards the viability of small farms as small farms have been found to use the inputs more intensively and hence exhibit greater productivity. In fact, even an organization like the World Bank has been lately talking about the need for redistributive land reforms. However, the Bank's insistence on "willing buyers, willing sellers" and sale at market price have ensured that the programme becomes a non-starter[11].Non-availability of rural credit and loans make such a proposal even more absurd.

Lack of rural credit has indeed played a spoilsport so far as the viability of small farmers is concerned. Input costs have risen, fertilizer subsidies have come down, and user charges on water and electricity have gone up. In addition, introduction of new varieties of seed marketed by major multinational companies, among other monetized inputs, have led to increased need for cash among the farmers. However, in the face of dwindling credit available from the formal sector, small cultivators are being forced to borrow from informal credit sources at very high rates of interest in order to pay for these cash inputs. These farmers run into great in difficulty if for some reason there is crop failure or output prices remain low.

While the Green Revolution technology was expensive and compelled many small farmers to lease out or sell their plots of land and offer them as agricultural workers on the fields of the large farmers, the technology nevertheless necessitated the use of more labour as the new seeds required more irrigation, more pesticides, more fertilizers, etc. However, recent advances in agricultural technology have been more labour-saving, thereby making life more difficult for agricultural labourers looking for work.

Changes in cropping pattern have also affected agricultural employment adversely. Not only has there been a shift away more sowing foodgrains to those of commercial crops, and to horticulture and floriculture, which require much less labour, many regions have simultaneously witnessed a shift away from crops which provided employment all the year round to crops which at best offered seasonal employment. SEWA reported in its annual report for the year 2001 that in many places in India tobacco has been replaced with banana and sugarcane, which are both cash crops. The tobacco crop ensured 12 months employment whereas the newly introduced crops did not[12].While reduced tobacco consumption is always desirable, ensuring the livelihood of agricultural workers should not remain a goal any less cherished.

With an increasing tendency to use labour-displacing technology in agriculture, use of expensive and monetized inputs, and a near non-availability of agricultural and other rural credit facilities for the small farmers the situation looks bleak for the small cultivators all through the world. More small farmers are now leasing out their land to large cultivators, leading to an increasing land concentration ratio, which in turn is encouraging more mechanization, and hence leading to more labour displacement. Only a reversal of the process of agricultural and economic liberalization is going to revive hopes of survival of the agricultural population.

[1] http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/521/521%20pushpa%20surendra.htm
[2] http://europa.eu.int/comm/agriculture/envir/report/en/emplo_en/report_en.htm#fig9
[3] http://216.239.41.100/search?q=cache:FgOo5dtYH7sJ:www.worldbank.sk/
Data/agricstudy/02%2520-%2520New%2520Chapter%25201%2520-%2520Ag%
2520in%2520the%2520Economy%2520%2520091102.doc+Slovakia+Czechoslovakia
+was+one+of+the+most+industrialized+countries+in+central+Europe+prior+to+the
+Second+World+War&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 (Table 1.1)
[4] http://www.macroscan.com/fet/apr03/fet220403Agricultural_Employment_2.htm
[5] For a detailed discussion on definitions of usual, weekly and daily status bases see
[6] http://www.macroscan.com/fet/jul01/fet240701Rural_Employment_1.htm
[7] http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aib775/aib775p.pdf
[8] Johnson, D.G."Agricultural Adjustment in China: Problems and Prospects," Population and DevelopmentReview, Vol. 26, 2000, pp. 319-334.
[9] Bernard D'Mello: Globalization and the Problem of India in http://frontierindia.scriptmania.com/page15.htm
[10] http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1705/17051090.htm
[11] http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year%202003/May2003/LandReform.htm
[12] http://www.sewa.org/annualreport/ar-eng-2.pdf

July 11, 2003.