Farmworker
A farmworker or farmhand, is someone employed for labor in agriculture. In labor law, the term "farmworker" is sometimes used more narrowly, applying only to a hired worker involved in agricultural production, including harvesting, but not to a worker in other on-farm jobs, such as picking fruit.
Agricultural work varies widely depending on context, degree of mechanization and crop. In countries like the United States where there is a declining population of American citizens working on farms — temporary or itinerant skilled labor from outside the country is recruited for labor-intensive crops like vegetables and fruits.
Agricultural labor is often the first community affected by the human health impacts of environmental issues related to agriculture, such as health effects of pesticides or exposure to other health challenges such as valley fever. To address these environmental concerns, immigration challenges and marginal working conditions, many labor rights, economic justice and environmental justice movements have been organized or supported by farmworkers.
Worldwide
In the United States
In Canada
Canada had 297,683 agricultural employees; 112,059 were year-around and 185,624 were seasonal or temporary. Qualifying employers in Canada can hire temporary foreign farmworkers from participating countries for periods of up to 8 months per calendar year for on-farm primary agriculture in specified commodity sectors, if the work involved totals at least 240 hours within a period of 6 weeks or less. This Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, established in 1966, brings about 25,000 foreign workers to Canada each year. About 66 percent of those work in Ontario, 13 percent in Québec, and 13 percent in British Columbia.Workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, being citizens of Mexico and various Caribbean countries, tend to be Spanish-speaking. Between 1991 and 1996, in British Columbia, the number of South Asian agricultural workers increased from 3,685 to 5,685, mostly Punjabi-speaking. Analysis published in 2000 indicated that "Of the 5,000 workers employed by the over 100 licensed Farm Labour Contractors in British Columbia, two-thirds were recent immigrants who entered Canada less than 3 years ago. Of the 700 harvest workers surveyed, 97 percent were Punjabi speaking".
Many of the issues noted for farm workers in the US also apply in Canada. Analysis pertaining to Ontario noted that "All workers are eligible for provincial health insurance... and workers compensation, and are covered by provincial health and safety legislation through the Ministry of Labour, and yet are not always able or willing to access these health and compensation services".
Every Canadian province and territory has an office that deals with labour and employment laws. A person at the local employment or labour-standards office can talk to farmworkers about fair pay, hours of work, rest periods, and working conditions, and provide other services. An employer cannot punish a farmworker for contacting an employment-standards office.
In Cuba
Prior to social changes in the 1960s, the all-important Cuban sugar-growing economy had an integrated rural-urban workforce—each season, town-dwellers helped to bring in the harvest.Subsequently, mechanisation ensued, causing agricultural employment to fall. In 2023, an estimated 17.1% of the Cuban workforce was employed in agriculture.
In Mexico
The Encuesta Nacionalde Empleo estimated 2.7 million agricultural workers in Mexico. About a million are migrants. There is much use of seasonal and migrant agricultural labor in northwestern Mexico, because of the considerable fruit and vegetable production occurring in that region. Rough estimates of peak seasonal labor requirements for Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California Norte and Sur are 400,000 to 600,000.Several issues, particularly low pay, and harsh working conditions have been identified that pertain to some farmworkers in Mexico. Many of these issues are pursued by farmworker organizations, with resulting labor action, e.g. strikes occurring in 2015.
Over the past quarter-century, water quality and pesticide issues affecting farmworkers in Mexico have been identified in peer-reviewed literature. The following examples are of interest but are not necessarily broadly representative. In the Mezquital Valley of central Mexico, in the early 1990s, about 85,000 acres were irrigated with wastewater. A study of the implications found that important outcomes were diarrheal disease and parasitic infections in farmworkers and their families. Pesticide issues were investigated in 200 farmworkers in a small area of northwestern Mexico in the 1990s. Of those workers, 59% could read at the third-grade level, few had received information about pesticides; 30% did not wear personal protective gear; and 20% had experienced acute pesticide poisoning at least once during the season investigated. A study was conducted comparing 25 farm workers engaged in pesticide spraying with a control group of 21 workers not exposed to pesticides, from the Nextipac community in Jalisco, Mexico. The exposed group showed acute poisoning in 20 percent of the cases.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, established in 1994, facilitated economic trade between the United States and Mexico. However, due to factors such as declining wages, the devaluation of the peso, and unilateral trade liberalization, production of different crops such as corn has decreased in Mexico while increasing in the United States. This was because NAFTA removed all barriers for trade including tariffs that were put into place. As a result, agricultural exports have shifted in favor of the United States. For example, corn grown in the United States is now cheaper than corn grown in Mexico, creating competition between the two countries. Before NAFTA, Mexican farmers could grow and sell corn without facing such intense competition from U.S. imports.
This major agreement has created a shift in the number of people, specifically farmers, in both countries. More people have migrated to the United States than Mexico due to the competitiveness of prices. Those people have looked elsewhere for work because there were no longer opportunities in their home country. According to data from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “From 1992 through 2012 the U.S. lost 245,288, or 22 percent, of small-scale farmers and 6,123, or 5 percent of mid-sized farmers”. In addition to having more advanced machinery, large U.S. agricultural businesses had the capital means to expand production and were heavily subsidized by the U.S. government, allowing them to outcompete Mexico’s smaller, less capitalized farms which was an imbalance that NAFTA exacerbated, contributing to the displacement of over two million Mexican farmers.
Most major farms continued to flourish while small scale farms suffered. This was mainly due to the growth of the meat and dairy industry which relied on fewer but larger scale farms to meet their needs. According to Ben Lilliston, director of Rural Strategies and Climate Change at Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, it is estimated that more than two million Mexican farmers closed their farms in the wake of NAFTA’s flood of U.S. imports, or as many as one-quarter of the farming population. While people from Mexico may have left agriculture, production is still the most important part of the food system, and the U.S. relies on a large portion of farmers to continue producing, many of whom are migrant workers who were previously farmers in Central Mexico. Without these workers, the U.S. food system would be placed in jeopardy.
In Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is an island community and a territory of the United States, which makes it especially vulnerable to environmental disasters such as hurricanes—particularly for the local farmers who live and work on the island year-around. These weather events increase the level of food insecurity in the country, which is detrimental to the local farmers who call Puerto Rico home. Hurricanes that cause food insecurity can hinder the livelihoods of local farmers and their families. It is difficult to obtain culturally appropriate, healthy, local food when environmental disasters occur, causing many people, including farmers, to suffer.For example, in 2017 Hurricane Maria caused over 69% of farmers to deal with one month or more of food insecurity, and over 38% of farmers dealt with continuing food insecurity that lasted for three months or more. According to a study done by Dr. Aníbal Ruiz-Lugo at the University of Puerto Rico, farmers with land in Puerto Rico, 43% lost their farms completely due to Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Maria affected the farmers with smaller amounts of land in rural areas, who experienced more food insecurity than those with larger amounts of land in larger, urban areas.
Hurricane Maria destroyed over 80% of the country’s agriculture, was linked to over 2,974 deaths, and caused the longest blackout in the history of the United States. After around six months, only 68% of people in Puerto Rico had received electricity again. The blackout was also detrimental to farmlands because it hindered access and transportation.