The Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture (CNA) called attention last week to the decline in rural job offers. According to the organization, these numbers reflect the decline in agricultural income, the consequence of the most damaging droughts to Brazilian agriculture in the past four years.
When only the formal jobs listed in the Ministry of Labor and Employment’s General Registry of Employment and Unemployment (Caged) are taken into account, the agricultural sector generated 219.94 thousand new positions between January and July of this year. This is 19% less than during the same period last year.
This is the smallest increase in formal rural employment since 2002, when the Caged registered the creation of 231.6 thousand jobs in the first seven months of the year.
This figure remained practically stable in 2003, when 232.5 thousand new jobs were created in the sector. There was a considerable increase in 2004, when the countryside witnessed the creation of 271.58 thousand new formal jobs.
These figures are part of a public alert issued by the CNA on the crisis that threatens to reduce the country’s agricultural harvest, in consequence of the scarcity of capital available to rural producers, according to the head of the CNA’s Economics Department, Getúlio Pernambuco. And this “will certainly affect agribusiness as a whole,” he says.
Agência Brasil
