The Prevalence and Characteristics of Labor Trafficking in Brazilian Agriculture

Abstract: Labor trafficking is thought to be disproportionately prevalent in global agriculture, but a lack of representative microdata measuring it impedes effective evidence-based policies to protect workers. In this paper, we report new evidence on the prevalence of labor trafficking from a large representative survey of agricultural households in four Brazilian states with substantial agriculture. We find that different estimation methods – probability sampling proportional to size (PPS) and the network scale-up method (NSUM) – and definitions yield prevalence estimates that range from 1.75% to 5.4% of agricultural workers, implying that between 264,000 and 815,000 Brazilian agricultural workers nationwide have been trafficked at some point within the preceding five years. Importantly, we also find that nearly 95% of all workers experience at least one exploitative employment practice related to trafficking, even when not meeting established definitions of trafficking. In general, these results suggest that labor trafficking is more prevalent in Brazilian agriculture than past estimates imply (particularly in the cocoa sector), and that the extent of worker exploitation is substantially understated by standard binary definitions of trafficking.