A global shift towards healthier, more sustainable eating patterns could reshape agricultural employment across the world, according to new research from the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI).
A global shift towards healthier, more sustainable eating patterns could reshape agricultural employment across the world, according to new research from the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI).
The study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health and led by Dr. Marco Springmann, Senior Researcher at the ECI and Professorial Research Fellow at UCL, examined how dietary patterns such as flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian and vegan diets would affect the number of people working to grow, raise and harvest food in 179 countries.
By combining detailed data on labor requirements for crops and livestock with models of global food production, the researchers estimated how dietary changes could affect the agricultural workforce. They found that adopting more plant-based diets could reduce global agricultural labor needs by 5–28% (equivalent to 18–106 million full-time jobs) by 2030, mainly due to lower demand for livestock production.
At the same time, around 18–56 million additional full-time workers could be needed in horticulture to produce fruits, vegetables, legumes and other plant-based foods. Overall, these changes could reduce global labor costs by US $290–995 billion per year (adjusted for purchasing power parity), equal to around 0.
