Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming

By B. White. 2012

439 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Youth unemployment and underemployment are serious problems in most countries, and often more severe in rural than in urban areas. Small‐scale agriculture is the developing world's single biggest source of employment, and with the necessary support it can offer a sustainable and productive alternative to the expansion of large‐scale, capital‐intensive, labour‐displacing corporate farming. This, however, assumes a generation of young rural men and women who want to be small farmers, while mounting evidence suggests that young people are uninterested in farming or in rural futures. The emerging field of youth studies can help us understand young people's turn away from farming, pointing to: the deskilling of rural youth, and the downgrading of farming and rural life; the chronic neglect of small‐scale agriculture and rural infrastructure; and the problems that young rural people increasingly have, even if they want to become farmers, in getting access to land while still young.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08d3926bc034fd46eaeda0559df67b2f3e98eb8d

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia's persistent smallholder (2016, background): “All this means, and as White (2012) says, that “thinking about youth, farming and food raises fundamental questions about 17 In 2008 the Nepal Labour Force Survey recorded that while 15 per cent of the total male population were recorded as living outside the country the figure for women was under…”
Poverty and the varieties of entrepreneurship in the pursuit of prosperity (2020, background): “There is a third concern that may challenge our theorizing in the future, which pertains to the fact that new generations are not taking over family businesses in developing contexts (White, 2012), despite the fact these are run by families.”
African Rural Youth Engagement in Agribusiness: Achievements, Limitations, and Lessons (2019, background): “For instance, access to land has not received adequate attention in the agenda of development partners working towards engaging youth in agribusiness [47,64].”
Adaptation and development pathways for different types of farmers (2019, background): “This kind of pathway is particularly critical given high levels of youth unemployment in many rural regions (White, 2012).”
Investing in smallholder agriculture for food security (2013, background): “Capacity to adapt to future changes will require increased investments in human capital (White, 2012; Proctor and Lucchesi, 2012).”
De-mystifying family farming: Features, diversity and trends across the globe (2015, background): “Similarly, a future in agriculture is unattractive for many people in developing regions due to the limited income and few opportunities for improvement (White, 2012).”