"When agricultural workers go hungry," 19 October 2018

...Food has backstories, too, none more unsavory than this one: agricultural workers—the people who make dinner possible—are also the most likely to go to bed hungry.

Every day, some 1.1 billion people—one-third of the global workforce—go to work at the world’s farms. And, every night, many of them return home—having suffered countless violations of their human rights—without enough money to feed themselves or their families.

Farm work is one of the only professions in which national legal protections are regularly ignored. Minimum wage standards endorsed by the International Labor Organization (ILO), and adopted by many industries around the world, remain either unenforced in the agriculture sector or do not extend to informal farm workers...

In rural parts of developing countries, 80% of farm workers earn less than $1.25 per day, trapping them in poverty...

...According to the ILO, dangerous machinery, long working hours, and exposure to toxic pesticides makes farm work one of the world’s deadliest jobs; more than 170,000 agricultural workers are killed every year on unsafe farms, twice the mortality rate of any other industry.

..[A]gricultural work is typically excluded from occupational health and safety rules in most countries...

Unfortunately, few agricultural workers are in a position to advocate for their rights. Seasonal and rural workers lack access to collective bargaining, and undocumented migrant workers avoid unions for fear that employers will retaliate by calling the immigration authorities...

...Holding people accountable for mistreating farm workers will be challenging, but not impossible. We can begin by calling on governments to spend more time protecting farm workers than investigating their immigration status.