According to a study recently published by FAO, agrifood systems provided direct employment for 1.23 billion people worldwide in 2019. In addition, almost half of the world’s population lives in households linked to agrifood systems.
Agrifood systems involve the primary agricultural production of food and non-food products, the production of food of non-farm origin, the food supply chain from producer to consumer and the final food consumer. Worldwide, these systems produce some 11 billion tons of food each year and form the backbone of many economies.
Robust data such as in this study, called Estimating Global and Country-Level Employment in Agrifood Systems, are essential to ensure that the transformation of agrifood systems is fair and generates new jobs.