Employment and number of agricultural establishments: exploring contradictory trends
Keywords:
self-employment, agricultural economy, agricultural laborAbstract
This paper contributes to understanding recent and seemingly contradictory trends in the Brazilian
agricultural labor market, where there is a substantial reduction in the employed population, concurrent with
stability in the number of agricultural establishments. Techniques of Descriptive statistical are applied to data
from various sources: Agricultural Censuses, microdata from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD),
and microdata from the Continuous PNAD. The findings indicate that, between 2006 and 2017, the number
of establishments was sustained by marked growth in non-family agriculture. Meanwhile, the decline in the
employed population in agriculture was solely due to reductions in family farming, which simultaneously
saw a decrease in the number of establishments and the average population per establishment. Regionally,
the overall employment drop during this period was concentrated in the Northeast and South, where
family farming experienced significant reductions. The stability in the total number of establishments was
supported by expansions in new agricultural frontiers in the North and Center-West, as well as a marked
increase in non-family establishments in the Northeast. Annual PNAD data confirmed the downward trend in
the number of employed individuals, as indicated by the census. Moreover, data from the Continuous PNAD, allowing analysis of the most recent period, revealed that these trends persisted, with the number of people
employed in agriculture decreasing by 15% between 2012 and 2022.
