Creating Productive Employment and Decent Work for Rural People:

What role can secure land rights play?

Issues Paper for ECOSOC 2006
ECOSOC 2006 HIGH-LEVEL SEGMENT
Ministerial Roundtable - Issues Paper
Geneva, 5 July 2006

Three-quarters of the world's poor, roughly 900 million people, live in rural areas where agriculture and natural resource-based activities are the basis for work and livelihood. It is a paradox that those living closest to the land, smallholder farmers, agricultural wage-workers and independent producers, are among the most vulnerable to food insecurity and poverty.

Expanding opportunities for decent work is critical to reduce rural hunger and poverty. As a starting point, policies governing land tenure and natural resources, including the distribution and security of rights, are directly linked to achieving productivity and income gains. These gains may have a further multiplier effect on employment opportunities, including in the non-farm sector.

Landlessness limits on-farm work opportunities, effectively increasing unemployment, while also leaving the poor with little choice except to cultivate on marginal lands. More equitable land distribution can increase environmental sustainability, while decreasing social tensions that can lead to conflict. Furthermore, secure access to land is an incentive for users, especially the poor, to increase their investments in the land, thus improving long-term productivity.

Secure access to land is a necessary but not sufficient condition to produce growth and improved work opportunities. Small-scale producers need fair access to inputs, market information and fair prices for their products. This requires infrastructure, extension services, technology, credit and related services in support of on-farm and off-farm employment.

In smallholder farming, productivity is often constrained by information asymmetries, lack of access to key services or weak bargaining power among poor households. In the Philippines , the Center for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development has worked with small-scale sugar farmers who had received land through the national agrarian reform program. By working together to buy their inputs and market their products, household incomes rose above the national poverty line. While these are significant gains, poor farming households remain constrained by lack of access to education, information (e.g., on real market prices of raw sugar) and technology, limiting their ability to earn income from other, more profitable stages in the sugar industry value chain, such as milling, refining, trading and marketing.

Where land ownership is highly concentrated, landless men and women most often have to turn to waged agriculture labour, where the working conditions frequently limit their ability to escape poverty - the temporary nature of much farm work, informal nature of contracts or agreements with employers, and lack of enforcement of minimum wages or social service guarantees. If organizing by farm workers is prohibited or repressed, either by employers or by the state, these challenges are magnified and opportunities to meet basic household needs through farm labour are limited. In many countries, modernization of the rural sector is yielding 21 st -century production methods, but maintaining 19 th -century labour relations.

In 2005, the Association of Farmers' Development Committees ( Comité de Desarrollo Campesino - CODECA) worked with Guatemalan farm labourers from 149 plantations to assess employment conditions. Only five percent of workers possess a stable contract with a guaranteed monthly salary, while 75 percent are relegated to looking for work on a daily or weekly basis. The salary of over 90 percent of farm workers is below the minimum wage established by national law. These farm workers lack legal protections: 71 percent had no written contract to document formal ties to their employers and more than half receive no social security, because employers do not report them as workers. These findings illustrate the risks that farm workers may face when landlessness is combined with limitations on rights of rural workers to organize.

In many rural areas, there are virtually no work opportunities for women outside of agriculture , particularly where women have less access to assets and education or where their social mobility is limited. Women are far less likely than men to gain employment in many natural resource-based sectors, such as logging and mining, even while expansion of these activities limits access to natural resources, the basis of daily work for many rural women. At the same time, women are playing a greater role in agriculture and becoming the primary guarantors of food security, as men increasingly migrate to urban areas. Despite these responsibilities, women often lack secure rights to land and access to productive requirements.

Although international agreements such as ILO Convention 169 provide for indigenous peoples' rights to customary land, these rights are not consistently recognized, meaning that the work of indigenous communities in cultivating land and managing natural resources goes unrecognized. Where these lands are instead given over as investment concessions, the benefits - including employment opportunities - are rarely enjoyed by local residents.

Collective action helps rural households to increase opportunities for decent work and productive employment, and to translate these opportunities into improved living conditions. Group activities can support improvements in the quality and quantity of rural production, and assist rural households build collective strength to access markets from positions of greater leverage. In common property settings, collective action can also be an effective way to manage natural resources as it can balance productive work with shared commitments to environmentally sustainable practices.

The need to create rural work and employment extends beyond the farming and natural resource-based sectors, and requires attention to the increasing links between rural, urban and peri-urban areas. However, in order for expansion in non-agricultural or non-resource based sectors to take place, attention must be given concurrently to (a) the distribution and security of rights to land and resources, (b) access to key support services, including via the state or civil society when not affordable through the market, and (c) the ability of rural people to organize themselves to participate in spheres of public life, including participation in markets and negotiation with employers, from a position of strength. Investment in these three areas may lay the groundwork not only for the expansion of decent work and productive employment in rural areas, but for rural sectors to act as engines of sustainable and equitable national growth.