Keywords: India, off-farm labor market, risk, crop choice.

The purpose of this research has been to examine the link between agricultural production decisions, particularly ex ante crop choice decisions, and off-farm labor income opportunities available to the cultivator households in a developing country context. The cultivator households in some areas of the developing countries use off-farm labor supply as an insurance against shocks in crop income. Yet employment is uncertain in the off-farm labor market. This thesis hypothesizes that, given limited opportunities for ex post consumption smoothing, employment uncertainty in the labor market influences risk averse farmers' ex ante crop choice decisions and farmers would opt for more conservative crop choices in case they expect unfavorable supply opportunities in the off-farm labor market at a later period. A two period stochastic dynamic programming model is developed. It has been shown that under some particular conditions, risk averse farmers' expectations of a lower depth of the labor market or a lower wage rate in that market in the next period would lead them to allocate more land to crops with safer returns. Again, in the presence of some risk-mitigating factors such as irrigation, farmers would take more risks in crop choices. For estimation, a panel data set from the ICRISAT survey of the semi-arid areas of India is used. Fixed effects and random effects Tobit specifications for estimating household land share and fixed effects and random effects specifications for estimating household crop returns and land share differences have been used. The regression results indicate significant impact of household expectation of the harvesting period male unemployment rates in the off-farm labor market on crop choices, taking the planting period male unemployment rates as a proxy. The results also indicate strong influence of household irrigated land share on crop choices. The results lend weak support for the linkage between crop choice decisions and the share of non-agric.

The Farm Labor Problem: A Global Perspective explores the unique character of agricultural labor markets and the implications for food production, farm worker welfare and advocacy, and immigration policy. Agricultural labor markets differ from other labor markets in fundamental ways related to seasonality and uncertainty, and they evolve differently than other labor markets as economies develop. We weave economic analysis with the history of agricultural labor markets using data and real-world events. The farm labor history of California and the United States is particularly rich, so it plays a central role in the book, but the book has a global perspective ensuring its relevance to Europe and high-income Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide readers with the basics for understanding how farm labor markets work (labor in agricultural household models, farm labor supply and demand, spatial market equilibria); farm labor and immigration policy; farm labor organizing; farm employment and rural poverty; unionization and the United Farm Workers movement; the Fair Food Program as a new approach to collective bargaining; the declining immigrant farm labor supply; and what economic development in relatively low-income countries portends for the future of agriculture in the United States and other high-income countries. The book concludes with a chapter called "Robots in the Fields," which extrapolates current trends to a perhaps not-so-distant future. The Farm Labor Problem serves as both a guide to policy makers, farmworker advocates and international development organizations and as a textbook for students of agricultural economics and economics. - Describes the unique character of agricultural labor markets providing consequential insights - Contextualizes the economics of agricultural labor with a global perspective - Examines the history of farm labor, immigration, policy and collective bargaining with a view to the future

Farming as it is practised in market industrialized countries is predominantly a family business. This book argues that the nature of the farm business cannot be properly understood without reference to the family that operates it. Examples are taken from the UK, USA, Europe and Australasia.

To understand whether and how inverse relationship between farm size and productivity changes when labor market performance improves, we use large national farm panel from India covering a quarter-century (1982, 1999, 2008) to show that the inverserelationship weakened significantly over time, despite an increase in the dispersion of farm sizes. A key reason was the substitution of capital for labor in response to nonagricultural labor demand. In addition, family labor wasmore efficient than hired labor in the 1982–1999 period, but not during the 1999–2008period.In line with labor market imperfections as a key factor, separability of labor supply and demand decisions cannot be rejected in the second period,except in villages with very low nonagricultural labor demand.

Using a combination of global, national and household level analysis this study examines the potential effects of agricultural policy and trade reform.