Food Supply Resilience and Migrant Workers

This paper explores the resilience of agricultural subsectors that rely on migrant workers, laying out short- and medium-term options to increase their resilience to a pandemic or similar shocks. In the short term, when the demand for labor is relatively fixed or inelastic, the major options are to induce local workers to substitute for missing migrant workers or to make exceptions to international mobiliy restrictions and admit temporary migrant workers to fill seasonal farm jobs. In the medium term, governments can influence the demand for migrant workers by subsidizing or taxing labor-saving mechanization, raising or lowering the cost of temporary migrant workers, and using trade policies to encourage or discourage imports of labor-intensive commodities.