IFPRI Home About Contact Careers Search  

Research 2020 Vision Countries Publications Datasets Library Events Media Learning  

IFPRI Publications 2020 Publications Search our Database Articles & Book Chapters Datasets Other Languages Order Form

Although the most harmful forms of child labor are on the decline, child labor in agriculture persists and may be even more difficult to eradicate. But success in this task would mean a brighter future for both poor children and poor countries.

In 1993, when Vietnam was on the cusp of an economic boom, more than half of its children were engaged in essentially full-time work. Fifty-seven percent of Vietnamese children between the ages of 6 and 15 worked at least seven hours a day. In many ways Vietnam's child labor situation was typical of poor, rural countries. Most child laborers work in agriculture, and Vietnam was an agricultural country—70 percent of its population worked in agriculture in 1993. Just five years later, however, in 1998, 2.2 million Vietnamese children had stopped working altogether. The country reduced the share of 6- to 15- year-olds working at least seven hours a day to 38 percent. It did not achieve this decline by undertaking a campaign against child labor. Rather, almost half of the drop came because Vietnam lifted its restrictions on rice exports.

Suddenly Vietnamese rice farmers could sell their grain abroad, rice prices increased, and many Vietnamese farm families used their extra income to take children off the job and send them to school. According to Eric V. Edmonds, an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth University who studied Vietnam's child labor transition, families whose income was near the poverty line reduced their children's labor the most, suggesting that "in valuing the child's time, few issues are more important than the desperate need for resources that poverty creates."

"Child labor is part of the survival strategy in many rural areas," says Guy Thijs, director of the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva. In most cases parents would prefer to send their children to school, he says. But two-thirds of the world's poor people live in rural areas, and many rural parents are too poor to do without children's labor or to pay school fees.

Child labor has dropped significantly in recent years. A 2006 ILO report entitled The End of Child Labour: Within Reach indicates that the number of child laborers fell from 246 million in 2000 to 218 million in 2004—a drop of 11 percent. Indeed, the worst forms of child labor—dangerous, illegal, and forced labor—fell by 26 percent over that period. Child labor in agriculture, however, has until recently received less attention from advocates and policymakers." There was a welcome fall in hazardous child labor," says Peter Hurst, a specialist on occupational safety and health at the IPEC," but in the future much more work needs to be done on child labor in agriculture and in Africa."

What qualifies as "child labor"? Do chores count? How about caring for younger siblings? What ages are included? Definitions vary among agencies and countries, but many understand "child labor" as it is defined by the ILO Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour. First, a child is defined as a person under 18 years old. According to the ILO, "child labor" is work performed by all children under 12 years of age engaged in any economic activities, including productive activities that are unpaid. It does not, however, include household chores and school. For children between 12 and 14 years old,"child labor" refers to more than a few hours a week of more than light work. Children aged 15–17 years old may also be classed as child laborers if they engaged in work that harms their wellbeing and hinders their education, development, and future livelihoods. Finally, the ILO definition includes all hazardous, illegal, or coercive forms of work performed by children. Activities like hazardous child labor, prostitution, warfare, and forced labor are termed the "worst forms of child labor."

Based on these parameters, the ILO reports that the Asia-Pacific region has the most child laborers, with 122 million, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa, with 49 million. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers from chronic poverty, rapid population growth, and large numbers of AIDS orphans, the proportion of children engaged in economic activity is 26 percent—the highest of any region.

"One has to be careful about the definition of child labor," says Assefa Admassie, associate professor of economics at the University of Addis Ababa. "Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of child labor in the world. If you define child labor only as dangerous work by children, then the proportion of child labor is low in Ethiopia, but if you consider child labor to be any activity that detracts from children's normal development, then you have a high incidence of child labor in Ethiopia." A 2001 survey by the Ethiopian government and the ILO showed that 52 percent of Ethiopian children between ages 5 and 17 were engaged in productive activities. When housekeeping chores were included, the figure rose to 85 percent.

The sector that employs by far the largest share of children worldwide—nearly 70 percent—is agriculture, and child labor in that sector remains persistent. Child labor in agriculture can harm children in two ways. First, agricultural work can threaten their health, and even their lives. Agriculture has been identified as one of the three most hazardous sectors in which to work, along with construction and mining. It can involve working with dangerous chemicals and equipment, lifting heavy loads, and staying at work for long hours—conditions that clearly pose a risk to children. Yet it is less clear whether other work performed by children—like gathering fuelwood, tending livestock, or caring for siblings while parents work in the fields—is harmful to them, and if so, how harmful.

Second, agricultural labor can keep children from attending school, thereby preventing them from gaining education that could help lift them out of poverty in the future. Millions of children engage in part-time work in agriculture that allows them to attend school as well. But when children work instead of attending school, child labor reduces children's life chances and can help perpetuate poverty from generation to generation.

But reducing children's labor in agriculture is a complicated task. "Part of the difficulty in eliminating child labor in agriculture," says the IPEC's Hurst, "is that it is wrapped up in the whole area of family farming. The children live where they work. There may not be schools nearby. And agriculture is a traditionally underregulated sector."

There may be cases when agricultural labor is better than a child's real-life alternatives. "Should a child be working, or should a child not be working? Well, what would the child be doing if she were not working? There's always this assumption that if a child weren't working, he or she would be in some educational utopia. That's obviously not very realistic," says Darthmouth's Edmonds." So would the child be doing something unambiguously better?" In some cases the answer may be yes; in others, no.

Clearly, the most important contributor to child labor is poverty. Rich parents do not send their children to work. A 1996 study shows that child labor declines as a country's income rises and virtually disappears once a country's per capita gross domestic product reaches US$5,000.

Poor parents in developing countries confront a difficult choice, says Edmonds. They must weigh the family's need for food, shelter, and clothing here and now against an investment in their child's future that could take years to pay off. The child's economic contribution, which can help provide basic goods for the family, may be economically productive farm work, like weeding crops or tending livestock. The contribution may be negligible, or it may be large. In Nepal, children are estimated to contribute 11 percent of the value of agricultural production, according to research by the Centre for Household, Income, Labour, and Demographic Economics (CHILD). Alternatively, children may perform household chores that allow adults to spend more time in income-generating activities. Often, the working child's main economic contribution may consist of freeing up money that would otherwise go to pay for schooling related costs.

In a 2002 study of child labor in the West African cocoa industry conducted by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), farmers reported that falling prices for cocoa in the 1990s had forced them to cut costs, and using family labor was one way of doing so. "I don't send my children to school because I don't have any money," said one Ivorian farmer, "so they help me work in the field."

This trade-off between current and future wellbeing becomes especially clear when a poor farm family faces a sudden shock, like the loss of a crop. Kathleen Beegle, senior economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, conducted research in Tanzania showing that poor families, when hit with a temporary loss in income owing to crop failure, tended to increase child labor and reduce their children's school attendance. Households that had more assets (like livestock or cash) and seemingly better access to credit were able to overcome the income drop without depending on more child labor.

So is better access to credit the key to preventing child labor? Not necessarily, says Beegle. Studies in other countries have shown a rise in child labor with increased credit when households start enterprises and use their children as workers in the new firms. "Whether or not credit helps," Beegle explains,"depends on what the credit is for and what the labor market is like."

Complicating the equation, it may be that child labor gives children experience that can benefit them, at least in the short term. Although little research has been done on how child labor affects children's long-term welfare, Beegle and her colleagues looked at how child labor affected young people's education and earnings over time in rural Vietnam. They found that young adults who had worked as children obtained less education but achieved substantially higher earnings than those who had not. It was not until about age 30, the researchers estimated, that the income the young people would have gained from education would exceed the income they gained from the additional work experience as children.

When parents are making decisions about whether to send their children to work, to school, or both, it matters whether the school charges fees, whether it is one kilometer away or five, and whether the school offers a high-quality education. "Parents value education," says the IPEC's Thijs. "They see it as an avenue for social advancement. They want their children to learn to read and write. When school fees are waived, you see a tremendous demand for education."

A recent study of rural Tanzania by researchers at the London School of Economics showed that distance to school also played a major role in whether children attended school but did little to reduce their work hours. In other words, the majority of children worked, and when schools were nearby they could combine this work with schooling.When schools were farther away, they could not take the time to travel to school and so became full-time workers. "Schooling and work are not perfect substitutes," explains Beegle. "You can get kids into school, but you may not reduce their work by the same amount."

The frequent shortage of schools in rural areas is an additional disincentive to pulling children out of work and into school. When Vietnam achieved its child labor reductions, it had the advantage of a strong schooling infrastructure. A study of India, however, has shown that if all the children who are supposed to be in rural primary schools showed up, there would be an average of 113 students per classroom. "Before we take steps to move children out of employment, we need to make sure they have somewhere to go," says Edmonds. If declines in child labor further impoverish poor families or do not go hand-in-hand with high-quality schooling, they could leave children even worse off.

To help tip poor parents' decisions in favor of school, some countries have decided to pay families to send their children to school. IFPRI has conducted evaluations of several programs that transfer cash or food directly to households that send their children to school and meet other conditions. Findings showed that such programs can help significantly reduce child labor and increase school enrollment.

Mexico was an innovator in this area. In 1997 it launched a program called Progresa (now called Oportunidades). The program pays families between about US$10 and US$35 a month if their children regularly attend school in grades three through nine. For children between the ages of 8 and 17, the program reduced the probability that boys would work by 10–14 percent and girls, by 15 percent. Similarly, a conditional cash transfer program in Nicaragua was shown to reduce the percentage of children aged 7–13 who were working by 5.6 percentage points.

Bangladesh instituted a program to increase school enrollment by supplying grain to families that sent their children to school. During the two-year period from the year before the start of the program to the year after the program was introduced, student enrollment in program schools increased by 35 percent overall—44 percent for girls and 28 percent for boys—although it had a smaller impact on child labor. Nonetheless, boys aged 12–14 enrolled in school worked just 2.3 hours a day, compared with boys not enrolled, who worked 7.2 hours. (Few girls worked outside the home in Bangladesh before or after the program.) "Although reducing child labor was not among the programs' goals, if it improves the life chances of the new school enrollees, it may mean that they in turn will not have to send their children to work," says Akhter Ahmed, a senior research fellow at IFPRI and the lead researcher on an IFPRI project evaluating Bangladesh's Food for Schooling program.

Substantially reducing child labor in agriculture and providing education to rural children will not be cheap, but it will generate high returns, according to the IPEC, which quantified the costs and benefits of eliminating child labor in a 2003 study. On the one hand, it projected the costs of providing education, managing a cash transfer program, intervening to eliminate the worst forms of child labor, and, for households, doing without the value of lost child labor. On the other hand, it projected the benefits flowing from people's improved productivity and earning capacity owing to more education, as well as better health owing to the elimination of child labor. The study found that benefits outweighed costs by a factor of 6.7.

To help draw attention to child labor in agriculture, the 2007 World Day of Action against Child Labor (June 12) will focus on the issue. And the ILO is bringing together a number of international agricultural organizations, including IFPRI, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), and the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers (IUF) to cooperate on eliminating hazardous child labor in agriculture, including collaboration on projects, training, research, and communication. Through their close contacts with the agricultural communities of individual countries, these organizations hope to bring the issue of child labor into the mainstream of agricultural policymaking.

"We need to build partnerships and alliances to eliminate child labor in agriculture—the numbers are too big and the problems too many," says Peter Hurst."We need to work with international agricultural organizations and agricultural ministries in developing countries to help raise farm productivity and income and to improve regulation."

Ultimately, he says, the goal is to create a healthy agricultural sector that provides families with a livelihood derived from safe, well-paid work performed by young people and adults—and not the labor of children.