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Will promotion of agricultural mechanization help prevent child labour?

Policy brief













FAO and IFPRI. 2021. Will promotion of agricultural mechanization help prevent child labour? Policy brief. Rome, FAO.




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    The FAO-IFPRI study, focuses on the use of tractors because they are among the most versatile farm mechanization tools and are universal power sources for all other driven implements and equipment in agriculture, with significant potential to replace animal draught power and human power, including children’s muscle power. Tractor use is typically also the first type of machine-powered equipment in use at lower levels of agricultural development, the context where most child labour is found. Mechanization is mostly assumed to reduce child labour, as it is expected to be labour saving in general. Yet, this is not always the case, as it has also been observed that the use of tractors and other machinery could increase children’s engagement in farm activities. This may be the case if, for instance, their use allows farms to cultivate larger areas, or if it leads to shifting chores of work from hired labor to family workers, e.g. for weeding edges of farmland not reachable by machinery. Evidence has been scant thus far, but the few available studies have mostly lent greater support to the hypothesis that mechanization reduces children’s productive engagement. Most available studies have focused on specific cases and based on scant data. The new FAO-IFPRI study provides a rigorous quantitative assessment for seven developing countries in Asia (India, Nepal and Viet Nam) and sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania) based on comparable farm household survey data.
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    Climate change-related events undermine children’s educational attainment, exposing them to child labour, hazardous work and forced migration. This nexus is particularly relevant for agriculture and its subsectors: indeed, they absorb about 26 percent of the economic impacts of climate change-related disasters and host 70 percent of all child labour. This study aims to identify the extent to which climate change-related events and impacts affect child labour in agriculture by exploring the underlying connection between the two challenges as the initial step towards integrating a child labour lens within the international community’s work on climate change. It showcases the multi-dimensional relationship through a mixed-methods approach in four countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Nepal and Peru. The qualitative and quantitative findings propose a set of policy implications that are in line with the concept that one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions are unlikely to work, as they must be tailored to different communities based on their characteristics.
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    This policy brief presents the findings from a study conducted by the Punjab Economic Research Institute (PERI), with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The objective is to analyze the causal relationship between gender roles and vulnerabilities, with a focus on women's work burden, and their effects on child labour in agriculture in Multan, Bahawalpur and Vehari districts, in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. The findings informed the design for the FAO component under the European Union funded CLEAR Cotton project. FAO's intervention centred on strengthening livelihoods of cotton producing households, through the provision of technical and life skills trainings for beneficiaries, to foster investments in children's education.

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