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Labor market perspectives of the Brazilian sugarcane agro-industry : prospects and challenges
(2012)
Brazil has five centuries of tradition in sugarcane production and is the world's largest producer and exporter of sugar. It is also the world’s largest exporter and the second largest producer of ethanol fuel. Economic, social and environmental aspects have caused structural modifications in the sugarcane production system including the mechanization of the harvesting operation. Mechanization has potential economic, environmental, agronomic and social impacts. From the economic point of view, it leads to cost reductions, and possibly higher productivity. Mechanization could also have a positive impact on the environmental dimension of the sector’s sustainability as it avoids the need for pre-burning practices, a point that is especially relevant for the ethanol supply chain. As mechanization enables the harvesting of raw sugarcane, dry leaves and tops (trash) are left on the field, which could have agronomic advantages. The recovery of a reasonable fraction of the sugarcane trash could potentially increase bioelectricity production. These energy gains could increase the sector’s competitiveness and to some extent avoid emissions from fossil fuels. On the other hand, agricultural mechanization can be considered a controversial agricultural technology as its increased intensity causes a negative balance in rural jobs creation. Mechanization simultaneously causes a demand increase for specialized agricultural workers and reduces the demand for non-specialized workers. Currently, the lack of qualified workforce is a challenge for the sector. In an attempt to bridge this gap, partially coordinated qualification strategies had emerged. Even when a number of additional jobs will be created, presumably the sector will not be able to relocate its current rural staffing. Large portions of these workers are temporary migrants from deprived regions of Brazil who typically have low levels of schooling, including a share of illiterate. Other agricultural products have also shown the tendency to reduce their number of workers, regardless of the increases in their production. This phenomenon, partially caused by increasing mechanization, could also hinder the opportunities of sugarcane harvesters to absorb into other rural activities. In addition, the changes undergone by the sector have been accelerated due to the introduction of environmental laws phasing out the sugarcane burning practice in various federal entities. The complexity of this transition and the remarkable heterogeneity of the sector were approached in this dissertation using the Human Capability Framework. The use of this tool led to the identification of key capacity and labor market influencing features based on stakeholders’ interaction and feedback. The framework was an instrumental part of understanding the multifaceted system of actors and structures, which have a stake in the developments of the sector. The identified capacity influencing features were: workers’ background, workers’ union affiliation, formal and informal skill formation, demographics and productivity. It was noted that key socio-economic indicators vary widely in a regional basis with a sharp substandard trend in the workers from the North and Northeast. The identified labor market influencing features were: national and international markets, legislation, agricultural trends, working conditions, the pace of mechanization, and Agro-environmental Zoning. The labor market is expected to undergo qualitative, quantitative, geographical and temporal changes depending of the interaction of these elements. It was concluded that there is an increasing influence of globalization on the developments of the sector and that these changes will heavily rely on the developments of production, area expansion, productivity, and the technology adopted. It was concluded that if coordinated policies in a number of separate but linked areas and plans for their implementation were developed, then labor supply and demand might be more constructively linked when dealing with economic, energy, and sustainability goals.