Dear all,
Thank you for this timely opportunity to contribute. Young people do face many challenges in working in agriculture – particularly in the age range traditionally associated with transiting from formal education to regular work. Some of these relate specifically to young people’s position and attributes; however, many also reflect (or are) broader challenges and structural problems for rural communities throughout the global South.
While many rural young people aspire to urban livelihoods, we see the problem of young people in agriculture as also reflecting a broader crisis of farming and economic peripheries. We also see a number of common misconceptions about the agency of young people. As members of a working group of researchers at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) studying youth and employment (and further Richard Longhurst's and Jim Sumberg's blogs; below) we would like to point out some key issues:
What kind of agrarian change? Inevitably a discussion on “decent jobs” for rural young women and men requires asking what kind of rural development is envisaged, and how it fits with societal needs and expectations. We wonder for instance, is the figure of “young agri-businessman/woman” coherent with existing social norms and forms of organisation? Does it cater for immediate food security, household reproduction, and future opportunities for the many (not the few)? Given references to securing employment in agriculture as well as “engagement in profitable agri-business”, broader questions about export-oriented commodity agriculture fuelled by foreign demand and FDI must be asked, and the issues of enhancing local demand, promoting family farming and decreasing age-related inequalities should not be neglected.
Entrepreneurship and demand. Interventions for youth employment, particularly among the adolescent age group, very often focus on education, skills-building, and training for entrepreneurship. This tacitly assumes that what young people have to offer in labour markets must be enhanced, but neglects where demand for their skills and services is to come from – whether as employees or as entrepreneurs. For example, business training and access to finance can be ineffectual or even harmful in environments where few business opportunities are available. The same may apply to skills training and education for farming, where young people have no access to land, which is often the case due to gerontocratic ownership, socioeconomic inequalities, or encroachment by agribusinesses.
Non-linear and muddled transitions. Scholars find that young people often pass back and forth between various “life stages” based on different circumstances. Policies that consider young people, particularly those who are out of school, as transitioning on a discrete “continuum” (assuming they have forever completed the step from school to work) will often miss their mark. Programming needs to focus on providing young people with work that corresponds to their specific needs and desires at the time. Particularly, since most rural youth under 17 are nowadays in school, programming must work better to combine school and employment.
Situated agency. Despite the established evidence on “social embeddedness” of young people, this is often still insufficiently reflected in policy approaches. Young people’s agency to find, finance and secure rural livelihoods is not individualistic, but strongly influenced by their embeddedness in family and kinship networks, and even friends. This is especially true for the 15-to-17-year cohort. Family members and peers may facilitate opportunities, placements and apprenticeships, and affect destinations for labour migration, or restrict young people’s choices and possibilities. Engagement in work importantly also creates opportunities to engage in new social networks, which may be attractive to young people. This calls for an understanding based on “situated agency” in addressing young people’s social relationships in a way is conducive and enabling.
Youth-problem or structural problem? It is crucial finally to flesh out what issues are truly youth-specific and what issues cover broader demographics. With lack of access to things like land, finance, and markets, it does not immediately follow that youth-specific programming (such as land banks for young men and women, or youth-directed credit) are most helpful. Shifts in customary arrangements which mean that young people are no longer assigned land by their elders to work on also cannot be addressed by targeting youth. Currently at IDS, in a project funded by CGIAR, we are exploring different factors that constrain agricultural livelihoods, to find which ones truly require a ‘youth-specific lens’ and which should be captured in broader structural policy processes.
In short, we welcome how many projects around the world are engaging with youth and agriculture. But with the portfolio of work at IDS on Rural Futures and future agriculture, and also food systems, young people’s employment, and finance, we are also keen to contribute broader, challenging questions about inequality, power distributions and the functioning of markets to discussions around the futures of young people in agriculture.
Justin Flynn
Philip Mader
Marjoke Oosterom
Santiago Ripoll
Dr. Philip Mader