Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

Here is a selection of titles proposed by FAO Publications for forum participants who would like to read more on agricultural policies and strategies that help to end child labour in agriculture.

Handbook for monitoring and evaluation of child labour in agriculture. Measuring the impacts of agricultural and food security programmes on child labour in family-based agriculture

This handbook offers tools for assessing the impacts of agricultural and food security programmes on child labour in family-based agriculture, and raises awareness of the importance of incorporating child labour prevention as a crosscutting issue in their planning, monitoring and evaluation system.

Protect children from pesticides – Visual facilitator’s guide

This widely used FAO–ILO–Rotterdam Convention helps agricultural extension workers, rural educators, labour inspectors, producer organizations and others in teaching farmers and their families on how to identify and minimize pesticides related risks at home and on the farm. The guide is guide available in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Child labour in agriculture – Infographic

This infographic provides updated facts and figures on child labour in agriculture and describes in a visual way the role that agricultural stakeholdres can play in addressing the issue.

FAO guidance note: Child labour in agriculture in protracted crises, fragile and humanitarian contexts

This note provides guidance to stakeholders intervening in protracted crises, fragile and humanitarian contexts to ensure that children are not engaged in activities that could negatively affect their health, development or education, and are not employed in hazardous working conditions.

Guidance on addressing child labour in fisheries and aquaculture

This document provides information and analyses to improve the understanding of causes and consequences of child labour in fisheries and aquaculture. The note also provides a wide range of recommendations for various stakeholders.

Child labour prevention in agriculture. Junior Farmer Field and Life School – Facilitator’s guide

This guide helps the Junior Farmer Field and Life School students and guardians recognize what could qualify as child labour as opposed to agricultural work that helps them learn valuable skills.

Ending child labour – The decisive role of agricultural stakeholders

This note focuses on the important role that agricultural stakeholders can play in the fight against child labour, and explores the role of government and agricultural-related ministries, the role of agricultural extension agents, as well as the role of produce organizations.

Eliminating child labour and promoting decent work in fisheries and aquaculture

This brief provides an overview of children’s engagement in child labour in fisheries and aquaculture, the risks they are exposed to, and what can be done to address the problem, with a particular focus on the role of fisheries stakeholders.

Children’s work in the livestock sector

This note gives an overview of child labour in the livestock sector, including the tasks carried out by boys and girls, and the conditions of work along with its implications on compulsory education. It also sets out a wide range of recommendations for various stakeholders.

Addressing the challenges faced by rural youth aged 15 to 17 in preparing for and accessing decent work

This document features the results of the “Expert Meeting on Addressing the Challenges Faced by Rural Youth Aged 15–17 in Preparing for and Accessing Decent Work”. The meeting contributed to the identification of feasible and effective policies and actions to enable rural youth aged 15–17 to prepare for and access decent work.

Forthcoming

Child labour framework

FAO e-Learning Academy

• Introduction to child labour in agriculture
• Engaging stakeholders to end child labour in agriculture
• Using data and knowledge to end child labour in agriculture
• Incorporating child labour in policies and strategies
• Addressing child labour in agricultural programmes
• Monitoring and evaluation of child labour in agriculture
• Communicating effectively to end child labour in agriculture
• Business strategies and public-private partnerships to end child labour in agriculture
• Pesticide management and child labour prevention
• Promoting youth employment and reducing child labour in agriculture
• Migration and youth in rural areas  

Child labor is an important problem from last few decades, however it was not addressed  so far in the right way since it had been clubbed with in general rather than in agriculture.

In developing countries rights are more necessary than the developed countres, since school food is one importnt step taken by the developed world.

In addition poverty hunger is close related isue even todate, being many countries are behind food security. On the other side though food secured like India unable to cope up the problem due to high population and a more unorganized designed sector of agriculture as well as labor. for eg. India, during COVID 19, central govt. did not bothered labor problem, and went on lockdown, by keeping advises dumped in garbage. This is one way poor experience, other way they thought in democracy decating disaster management, so political role is more important in this problem, being India a large country with a workforce/livelihood of 65% population in agriculture. In addition, seasonal labor migrate with child labor and employ them once crosed just little after 8 years in girls and boys upto 10 years. Although it is one part in SDG2 poverty addrssed about the issue, and none of the local governments taken as a task...

what we can do

FAO can address and advise in ranges

1. compulsory education at least 8th standard.... during which not to engage any labor work or to migrate them with parents and stop education... for which Governments to address the isssue with flexible manner 

2. a seperate rules gender wise since women is more importnt and address some more issues based on their periodical changes....

3. During school days a compulsory period of kitchen gardening to be added and it makes a kind of income to schools as local grown food, but also teach how to address it as a labor, how attractive of agriculture to direct their mind towards food security... and rural development

4. it stops of migration one side, other side improve the economy with sizeable attraction beides restoring, employment, but cut down polluting the earth.

5. in this direction, those to stop or disscontinue of education, can be latter stage easy development of engage in local agricultural activities including landless.

6. This way it develops to involve direct farmers market creation, using fair and logic market ssystems

7. Engaged labor - make it mostly employed with contractual one to enable to make money. No entertainment of monthly wages and bonded labor. Though daily wage is good, but interest of management mostly it is inregulated wages.

8. Child safety engaged abor after 12 years with insurance of child, till adult is necessary.

9. Entertain and free online and or distant education after school drop outs engaged in agriculture to enhance skills

10. Health check up by creating record.

Hope above will address for a world with a little flexy in my opinion.

by professor , Dr. KBN Rayana

professor chair andd DG - IAMMA

professor - Jaipur nationaal University

Hyderabad -Jaipur/India 

1. Hunger and Malnutrition, in Tanzania the rural schools under the Government and the child parents agreed on the school feeding program through parents contributions and stakeholders support in  provision of school meals to school childrens, the program improves childrens attendance to schools and reduces child labour. The local Goverments also introduce and implement the policy of arresting both childrens not going to school, the parents who not taking their childrens to schools and the farmers who taking their childrens to farms during school hours. This is supervised by village chairpersons, ward executive officers and social policies. The role of agricultural stakeholders is to support farmers to improve agricultural production, farmers access to inputs, credits, extension services, value addition and access to markets.

3. Family Farming, In Tanzania the agricultural producers and marketing co-operatives is linked with saccos or open up credit windows for their farmers to access credits to cover labour costs in their farms. This reduces child labour.

4. Innovation, In Tanzania we have a program of linked Agricultural co-operatives with tractors suppliers, for the co-operatives to access tractors in loan and pay in installment, this improves mechanizations and reduce child labour. Also farmers who also raising cattles/donkey use local mechanization of the hoe driven by animal, this also reduce child labour. TFC and FAO implemented Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools (JFFLS) Program, that built the capacity of youth farmers in best agricultural practices, explore agricultural opportunities in their rural areas, understand child labour and be ambassodors of educating other farmers in combating child labour in rural areas.

Dear Participants,

Thanks to all of you for the sharing your insights, recommendations and posing questions related to the root causes of child labour and hazardous work to the wider community.

Certification schemes certainly have strong potential to set environmental and social criteria based on consumer demand and can certainly be leveraged to set higher decent work standards for plantations and employers, including addressing child labour. To further add to this point, it is equally important to consider how these measures are being monitored in practice and ensuring that employers are not only abiding by legislation but also providing decent working conditions for agriculture agriculture workers (including formal contracts, fair wages, right to collective bargaining etc.) in order to address the root cause of child labour.

An interesting contribution was this made this week on smallholder access to mechanization in order to address child labour in family farming. Moreover, there was also a question on whether children working in agriculture come to harm more frequently or experience different or more severe harm than adults. To briefly add to this point, we do know that risks are more acute to children under 18. The reason for this is that they are still growing both psychologically and physically. They have less natural defenses and have less cognitive maturity in terms of 'risk-taking' behaviours compared to adults. If we look at employment in all sectors, children and young workers display higher rates of injuries, and acute and chronic diseases compared to adults [1]. While it is challenging to find substantial evidence on the rates of injury and diseases amongst children in agriculture (harm incurred) for sub-Saharan Africa, it certainly remains an area where additional research seems critical. On a global scale, previous research (2006) suggests that the fataility rate in the agriculture sector is four times higher for young workers than in other industries [2]. Furthermore, the importance of addressing hazardous work in agriculture for all workers is essential, yet the fact that children are exposed to greater risk, would imply their need for particular attention.

We encourage the continuation of the discussion on the points mentioned as well as contribution of research, experience, case studies and recommendations of the additional themes questions mentioned above.

Thanks very much,

Jessie Rivera Fagan [Facilitator]

[1]: For more information on hazardous child labour please see the ILO pubication: https://www.ilo.org/ipec/Informationresources/WCMS_IPEC_PUB_30315/lang-…

[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J096v11n02_09

I think one of the keys to minimizing the need for child labor in smallholder agriculture is to address a major oversight in the effort to improved agronomic production particularly in SSA that relys heavily on manual labor. I think it is safe to assume most parents are interested in their childern's overall welfare and would perfer not to have them involved in child labor. Instead they see it as essential for thier family survival. The need thus is to take a close look at how to reduce the overall drudgery associated with manual smallholder farming.

This gets to the limits of the agronomy discipline as it does an excellent job of determining the agronomic potential of an areas while saying nothing about the operational resources need to expend small plot result across a smallholder community. The underlying default assumption is that it is not a problem and farmers only need extension/educated on improve techonlogy and the adoption is then fully discretionary. I think this is far from true as the manual labor can be extremely limited. Unfortunately, the availablity of labor or labor substitues falls into an aministative void between the agronomists or other applied biological scientists and the social scientists. Who in an agronomic development effort is responsible to determine the amount of labor needed, the availability of the labor and what are the rational compromises in apply improved technology, most of which require additioal labor, when the labor is not available?

Has anyone looked at the dietary energy balance between the 4000 kcal/day energy required to undertake a full day of agronoic field work and th approximately 2000 to 2500 kcal/day available, to most smallholder farmers. This is just meeting basic metabolism needs with only enough energy for a few hours of field work with perhaps limited diligence. The result is taking up to 8 weeks for basic crop establishment with progressively declining yield until it is virtually impossible to meet basic family food security with manual agriculture. You simply cannot hoe your way out of poverty. Thus to effectively reduce the reliance on child labor the most effective means may be to facilitate smallholder access to mechanization for basic crop establishment and perhaps mechanical threshing to improve the yield recovery.  This has to be done through private ower/operators of equipment and not through any means of shared equipment.

Please visit the following webpages: https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/OperationalFe… : https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/calorie-energy-balan… ; https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/DietPoster.pdf ; https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/most-effective-proje…;

Thank you

Hi to all,

Apart from family farming, there are also pregnant questions about ending child labour in large scale plantations (timber, rubber, cocoa, oil palm) throughout the world.

Child labour might exist either through direct employment by the plantation or its subcontractors, or through work for food procuction for the family, as both parents are busy with plantation crops and cannot take care of the family garden, cattle or ponds.

A large part of agroindustrial products are sold on European and US markets, which have managed to maintain a high level of stringency on the quality component of imported raw material. Il many cases, quality is attested through national or regional (EU) regulation, or by certification systems.

More and more, such certifications systems (such as FSC for timber or RSPO for palm oil) are incorporating new principles and criteria which relate to issues such as traceability, geographical origin or GHG emissions. A proper way to fight child labor in agroindustrial plantations would be to incorporate child labour assessment into principles and criteria qualifying certified products. Multistakeholder platforms for certification standards have the power to design "Child Labor-Free" certification systems and to make them visible to the buyers and the large public.

In several commodity chains, governments (both local and provincial) are also involved in national certification schemes which are  piloted by public bodies. It is of paramount interest to make such schemes sensitive to child labor issues, as they can establish connection to social services and point out subsectors and/or regions in which risks are high.

Concommitantly, this will send a signal to investors in the sector, which are increasingly requiring  trustable criteria for ethical investment.

I hope this would help.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones,

Alain.

It is widely understood that everywhere in the world agricultural work is hazardous. Hazards associated with sharp tools, pesticides, livestock, heavy loads, machinery, long hours and isolation can result in a range of physical, health and psychological harms of varying severity, the worst of which may be fatal.

Safety science tells us that the path between hazard and harm is seldom simple or linear. Rather, in the case of agriculture, it is mediated by a plethora interacting factors, from the socio-economic and demographic characteristic of the workers; through the type of farming system, the specific tasks and working conditions, and the nature and governance of the value chain; to the effectiveness of the state (and others) in monitoring labour practices and enforcing regulations.

My question is this: for Sub-Saharan Africa, do you know of evidence to suggest that children working in agriculture come to harm more frequently or experience different or more severe harms than adults? In other words, if child labour is ultimately about harm, should the discussion be framed as a crisis of ‘children’s harmful work’, or a more general crisis of ‘harmful work’?

In order to address this situation surrounding Child Labour in Agricultre, I would recommend 3 strategies:

1- Develop a national data register on childre, especially in vulnerable communities, these are more likely to be engaged in Agriculture early in life.

2- Include farmers and members of the farming community in policy formulation and key decision making.

3- Create a working or task group to monitor implementation and compliance with national and local regulation.

Addedd: Design an incentive system that support local farmers with some support or services, only if they pledge to not engage their children or wards in child labour, and would report same

Dear participants,

Thanks very much for your valuable contributions to date. Many interesting examples have been provided over the past week. This includes how specific countries have successfully tackled child labour in agriculture through, for example, conditional monthly cash payment transfers to rural families who had been previously engaging their children in child labour in Brazil. Participants have also pointed out important considerations such as unequal power relations between value chain stakeholders and the need for more marginalized groups, including landless and contract farmers, to receive specific support to enhance their participation in decision-making. Among several interesting contributions, there has also been mention of the importance of additional research on rural labour shortages and child labour, the need to look at the mental health of current and former child labourers and the potential of trade mechanisms including multilateral accepted monitoring standards that could improve social commitments amongst exporting countries and address child labour in globally traded agricultural products.

I encourage all participants to continue the discussion and new participants to share your experience based on the several questions listed above. To the extent possible, we encourage global, regional, national and community-based case studies on how certain policies or strategies have been effective and what has been the role of agriculture stakeholders in this process. Who have been involved in these policies or programmes from policy makers to rural community members? We kindly encourage you to list the theme or question for which you are providing your related experience.

Thanks again and we look forward to a continued fruitful discussion over the coming weeks.

Jessie Rivera Fagan [Facilitator]

As noted above, children often work to meet a minimal subsistence standard. In the agricultural sector this can come at a high cost, as children are often eganged in danagerous activities, including working with sharp objects or in wet, dark or cold surroundings. Conditional cash transfers as well as school meals have been shown to help chidlren get out of work and are therefore seen as beneficial. From a health perspective, these children are less likely to be put in harmful situations.

However, having had to work can also be associated with profound psychological costs that will not be addressed by the above policies. In turn, poor mental health in children can have serious consequences later in life, including substance abuse, violence and poor reproductive health.

Mental health is often a neglected health issue in developing countries, especially when it comes to children. Measuring and monitoring the mental health of current and former child laborers is likely to help better mitigate the effects of this problem. Family education programs teaching parents to identify mental health issues in children and adolescents are likely to be beneficial. Schools could also provide councelling and other treatments, particularly in rural areas.