Agricultural employment in Namibia: not the engine of wage employment growth

This paper examines trends in national agricultural employment between 1991 and 2000 using official government statistics. The paper uses four official data sources to explore trends in agricultural employment compares this data with data from other sources.The paper finds that:employment in commercial agriculture has fallen, a result which contrasts with estimates from the Agricultural Employers Associationemployment in subsistence agriculture has increased over the periodthere is evidence that employment in informal sector activities in the agriculture sector has also experienced some growthmeasuring employment in the agriculture sector is particularly difficult given the high degree of seasonality, high levels of family and casual labour, and the effect of weather conditionsgrowth in wage employment in agriculture appears to have fallen far short of the government’s national development targetsThe paper concludes that:agricultural employment is a highly complex issue which is hard to quantify for a variety of reasons, such as the seasonal nature of the workit is hard to speculate on which factors have driven agricultural employment since a large range of factors have probably contributed to change including labour regulations, investment conditions and capital intensity, trade and pricing policies, HIV/AIDS, environmental conditions, educational access and school enrolment, and general rural-to-urban migrationin total about 6,800 employment opportunities were created in Namibia’s agricultural sector in the period between 1991 and 2000 and that these were in subsistence farmingthe subsistence farming sector appears to have substituted unpaid family workers for paid workers but value added per worker appears to have fallen