During the last three months, the Agricultural Policy Research Center (APRC) of ISET-PI was working on a study about family farming in Georgia. Within this project, we conducted interviews with farmers and owners of agribusinesses. These interviews elicited many intriguing facets of Georgian agriculture, but one aspect I found particularly interesting was that Georgian farmers apparently have a rather negative view on agricultural jobs.
In Samtskhe-Javakheti we were told the story of a middle-age unemployed man who was offered a job as a shepherd by another family from his village. For 400 GEL per month and free food the man was supposed to bring cattle to the nearby pasture in the morning and back to the village in the evening. But despite these favorable conditions he rejected the offer and decided to find work in Turkey instead. When soon afterwards he returned back to his village, he was sick and disenchanted. In Turkey, his job had been to collect trash, an unhealthy and unpleasant task, for about 12 GEL per day, amounting to a monthly salary of less than 400 GEL. Even though he earned less money in Turkey than he could have made as a shepherd, he preferred to not work in agriculture.
This may reflect a more general aversion against agricultural work. In other interviews, owners of small agribusinesses emphasized the difficulties to find reliable and motivated laborers for doing simple agricultural jobs like shepherding, collection of tea leaves and fruits, etc. These employers reported that many young people would prefer to stay unemployed and spend the whole day at so called “birzhas” in their villages (outdoor places where people who have nothing to do get together for chatting and gossiping) instead of working in agriculture.
MONEY IS NOT THE ISSUE
A straightforward explanation why people avoid agricultural jobs would be low salaries. Yet if one compares the average monthly salaries in agriculture with average salaries in other sectors, agriculture does not do so badly. As shown in the chart, the average monthly salary in agriculture in 2013 was 495 GEL, higher than the average salary in education (423 GEL) and about the same as the salary earned in the hotel industry (491 GEL).
Salaries in sectors like health and social work are a bit higher but quite close to the average salary in agriculture. These numbers do not support the idea that the aversion against agriculture is due to low payment.
There may be various reasons why people try to avoid agriculture. One has to get up early to milk cows, one hardly has free days, the work itself is often inconvenient and dirty. Rural areas lack entertainment facilities and infrastructure young people consider important. This may all contribute to the observed behavior, but this may be aggravated by a negative attitude towards agriculture as an employment opportunity.
Low social prestige of farmers and agriculture in general would be fueled by negative stereotypes about rural life. A 2013 study titled “Intercultural education research in primary grades of Georgia” by the Center for Civil Integration and Inter-Ethnic Relations analyzed Georgian school books to find out whether they contribute to the formation of stereotypes among kids. It turned out that the majority of texts in those books foster negative stereotypes regarding rural and urban life. For example, some stories evoke the impression that primarily grandparents are living in villages. Other stories found in the textbooks indirectly conveyed the message that urban kids are more willing to study than kids from rural areas. Another stereotype associated with farming and rural life is poverty.
FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES
If people have no appreciation for their jobs and workplaces, this may impair their motivation. In Georgia, many people who have small plots of land do not do anything to exploit this economic asset but rather migrate to the city, where they often live from social assistance provided by the government, or move abroad. This behavior could be explained by a preconception of people that agriculture is no way to improve economically.
If people have a negative view on their jobs, they will hardly develop drive and initiative to improve things. This may be one of the underlying factors explaining why it turns out to be so difficult to increase productivity in the agricultural sector of Georgia. Many ideas were tried out, like providing machinery to Georgian farmers or incentivizing them to form cooperatives, but did not lead to substantial productivity improvements. A lack of verve among Georgian farmers would explain the often ambivalent outcomes of such initiatives.
The 2013 study “Comparative Analysis of Agriculture in the South Caucasus”, commissioned by UNDP, compares the productivities of the agricultural sectors of Georgia and its neighboring countries. In many commodities, like wheat, maize, potatoes, and tomatoes, Georgia is lagging behind. For example, Georgians manage to grow between 5 and 10 tons tomatoes per hectare land, while in Armenia this number is almost 40. With potatoes, the Armenians are about 50% more productive, and they produce almost 5 times as much maize per hectare than Georgian farmers. And that is true despite the fact that there is twice as much rain in Georgia than in Armenia.
If people do not believe in their jobs, they will not be motivated and interested in acquiring knowledge, upgrading their technology, making investments, and employing new methods and technologies. This can offset the good natural conditions of a country like Georgia, which has plenty of rain and a great soil. If most people working in agriculture consider their job as a survival strategy and not as a viable employment opportunity, productivity will stay low.
Perhaps, it would be useful to have an information campaign which aims to change the reputation of agricultural jobs. Modern farming in Western countries utilizes on knowledge in soil science, veterinary sciences, nutrition, microbiology, ecology, chemistry, and even engineering and business administration. In developed countries, successful farmers are well-educated and know their business, they do earn money and they are not necessarily old. Today there are a few examples of this kind of farming in Georgia and one should present these as role-models to the rural population in Georgia. Changing stereotypes is difficult but not impossible.
Comments
Congratulations on the first piece, Salome! Attitudes are indeed an important aspect of agriculture in Georgia.
However, I would say that money is also an issue. The statistics you are showing, i.e. nominal salaries refer to only those, who are formally employed in agriculture. I can imagine what a low share it is among all those who work in agriculture by default. Maybe formal employment is valued more, but generally agriculture does not provide a lot of income for the majority.
I also agree that productivity is low in Georgian agriculture, but Armenia is not the best country to be compared with. As far as I recall, statistics is not very reliable there.
Last, but not least, it would be great to show this guy to all farmers in Georgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjDpqXcy2PQ&list=PLLN6X4MktrBip2Bt4fBA88wC6w76HsHE7 .
"Many young people would prefer to stay unemployed and spend the whole day at so called “birzhas” in their villages (outdoor places where people who have nothing to do get together for chatting and gossiping) instead of working in agriculture." This is not only about young people but also middle-aged ones.
Kakheti, Guria - places which I often visit are full of such people. I know many cases when they were offered well-paying jobs (usually short term) but it is these stereotypes that working for someone else in the village translates into "being a slave" or being deprived of social status, etc.
Dear Koka,
Thanks for reading my blog and commenting on it.
Very good point about culture and stereotypes. Culture plays a huge role in the development of any country. And sadly some features of our culture sometimes prevent us from being successful. Many people migrate to other countries, like Turkey for example and do agricultural jobs there because their friends and neighbors can't see them abroad.
Dear Nino,
Thanks for your comment.
As to low incomes, what I can say from my experience (meetings with farmers and owners of agribusinesses) is that, when they are asked about their main constraints they tend to say "lack of finance". And when you dig deeper, you find out that there are plenty of other things which are not considered by the respondent. So for example, an owner of the cheese factory might say that he wants to expand his business but he does not have enough money to buy new equipment. And this might be the case indeed, but if you ask simple questions like "where he is going to sell cheese?", "Who are going to be his new partners, if any?" you might not be able to get a clear answer. That's because these things are not planned and well thought ahead. And then you think "is it really all about money?"
I think that, and you might agree, that money can't be earned without effort. And effort should be coming first. No effort and motivation, no money. It seems like our farmers need somebody who tells them "Hey guys, you can make money out of the land you have, you just need to think about it seriously and work hard". It does not matter whether you are a farmer or a lawyer, point is to do well what you do. And then you will have money.
As to comparisons, Georgia can be compared with France for example who is a leader in terms of agricultural productivity (value added per worker), however comparison with Armenia is interesting because both countries are post Soviet countries and have a lot of similarities. Moreover Armenia has less favorable natural conditions and still does better in terms of productivity. Which signals that something is going wrong here in Georgia. In Soviet times Georgia was one of the leading countries in terms of agricultural production, but now it's lagging far behind it's neighbors and other former Soviet Union members. One might say that comparison with a country which has similar history and is at the similar stage of development is quite fair. Although I agree that accuracy of data in developing countries is an issue.
A great source of information on small farmers' behaviour are financial institutions.
If one enquires amongst financial service providers in the countryside (banks and MFO's) about the creditworthiness of smallholders, they seem to agree that around 20% of smallholders are a good risk for small loans because they actively manage their tiny enterprises. They put some time in every day to scouting the crop, repairing infrastructure, looking for buyers, crop care and other tasks, and are relatively disciplined. Despite the manifold challenges of being a small farmer in Georgia, objective financiers consider such people to be potentially upwardly mobile and worth supporting with depositors' funds.
The other 80% are not considered by the financial service providers to be actively managing their land plots, in some cases for very good reasons, and may not be considered a good risk for farm loans, or indeed may not need them. Sometimes they are too elderly or in such poor health that physical labour is beyond them. Sometimes remittances from abroad or the city are enough to keep them relatively comfortable without having to work hard on their plots. Sometimes their off-farm work is relatively well-paid but time demands of employment preclude actively managing their land plots out-of-hours.
In other cases, a poor work ethic, alcohol abuse, family breakdown, learned helplessness and other negative behaviours stand in the way of some small scale landowners becoming upwardly mobile. It is not possible to rectify these issues through farm vouchers, cheap loans, subsidised insurance, value-chain studies or extension services; other welfare-oriented approaches must be considered independent of the Agriculture Ministry budget.
I can attest that hiring casual labour in the countryside is becoming increasingly difficult, especially since the databases of the Revenue Service and the Social Welfare department were linked (resulting in those who accept pay for labour having welfare benefits cut or abolished). Given the tax rebates awarded to low-income earners, for seasonal farm labourers working within an hour's drive of Tbilisi, a net wage of GEL36/day is achievable, which is not much different to a manual job in the city.
As a rule it is much easier to find women (jncluding middle-aged and relatively elderly women) who are willing to do piece-work and day-labour on the farm than men, in my experience by a ratio of two to one. Issues of face and prestige that Koka mentions no doubt play a role in this.
Dear Simon,
Thanks for your comment.
Very interesting facts indeed. I particularly want to emphasize your point about connection between social assistance and employment in agriculture. As you said, people sometimes refuse to take jobs because they are afraid of loosing social assistance. I want to add that this happens not only in case of part-time job offers but there were cases when cows were distributed in one of the regions of Georgia in the framework of one of the projects and some people refused to get a cow (for free!) because that would mean that they have some source of income. More work should be done in this direction as well in order to make sure that social assistance is helping people and is not harming them.
Regarding the "lack of finance" excuse, banks and MFO's are flush with liquidity and would like to do more rural lending. There is a shortage of good proposals, not a shortage of funds. Developing a sound business plan according to a simple template can spell the difference between success and failure in raising finance, and most small-town accountants can help develop these at very low cost.
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