Research Projects
Overview of ongoing projects
- Nigeria: Labor in the growing tomato sector. Our project and survey cover Nigerian tomato farmers as well as local and migrant workers, who are employed by farmers to grow and harvest tomatoes. We capture different dimensions of mental, physical, and economic well-being of workers and farmers to understand how they can be improved, for example through farm practices or technologies. Furthermore, we study how the tomato labor market functions using experiments and a repeated survey. The results from our project are relevant beyond tomatoes and Nigeria since we lack a general understanding of how agricultural labor markets function, and increasingly so in the age of digitalization.
- Myanmar: Working conditions and mental health amongst conflict. Our project focuses on farm workers in Myanmar, a country that, today, hosts one of the most overlooked and devastating conflicts globally. We collaborate with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and their local partner organizations to collect data among farm workers throughout the country. Our goal is to understand how conflict shapes labor markets, working conditions, and mental health among farm workers. These insights are relevant beyond Myanmar since the world is experiencing the highest number of violent conflicts since World War II, directly affecting about two billion people. Most affected by the consequences of conflict are typically countries and populations already facing a range of challenges, such as food-insecure countries and landless workers in rural areas.
- Global: How does labor and migration policy affect farmers? Labor and migration policies are heavily debated and researched, but seldom in the context of farming, although they are especially relevant for the farm sector. In different projects and using secondary data from around the world, we analyze how labor and migration policy affects workers, farmers, and agricultural production.
- Ghana: How do workers see their working conditions and can worker unions help to improve the situation for workers? Our project features food service workers in Ghana’s capital Accra who sell meals on the street or in restaurants. Food service workers in Ghana often face precarious working conditions and poor pay. For our project, we collaborate with the key worker union in Ghana to understand how worker collective action could be promoted to address challenges such as poor working conditions, prospects, and social protection. We assess whether workers’ perspective on their working conditions diverges from what international organizations define as decent work because this has implications for policies, employers, and worker unions. Our project emphasizes the overlooked role that worker unions could play, also beyond Ghana, especially in contexts where food system workers are hard to reach through governmental labor and social policy.
- Switzerland: How does environmentally-friendly farming affect workers and labor demand among farmers? In this collaborative project with ETH's Agricultural Economics and Policy Group, we focus on Swiss grapevine producers and their hired workers, who often come from Eastern or Southern European countries to help with farm activities such as harvesting. Our key question is how the transition to low-pesticide production systems affects labor demand and the allocation of labor on farms; as well as workers’ health and wellbeing. For this project, we interview grapevine farmers and workers through a repeated survey in all Swiss wine-growing regions.