Off-farm Work among Rural Households: A Case Study in the Brazilian Amazon

This article analyzes off‐farm work among subsistence‐level farmers in the Santarém region of the Brazilian Amazon. We build on the literature on rural livelihoods in the Global South by exploring how the opportunity to work off the farm is embedded in social relationships. We additionally different...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Rural sociology 2013-03, Vol.78 (1), p.29-50
Main Authors: VanWey, Leah, Vithayathil, Trina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural Occupations
Amazon
Amazon Basin
Brazil
Cultural Capital
Economic sociology
Employment
Farmers
Farms
Foreign Countries
Households
Human Capital
Income
Interpersonal Relationship
Job Security
Labor Supply
Labour supply
Place of Residence
Prediction
Probability
Role
Rural and urban sociology
Rural Areas
Rural Development
Rural employment
Rural sociology
Social Capital
Sociology
Sociology of economy and development
Sociology of work
Sociology of work and sociology of organizations
Standard of living. Income
Wages
Working population. Employment. Women's work
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Summary:This article analyzes off‐farm work among subsistence‐level farmers in the Santarém region of the Brazilian Amazon. We build on the literature on rural livelihoods in the Global South by exploring how the opportunity to work off the farm is embedded in social relationships. We additionally differentiate our analysis by type of off‐farm work, and examine how other characteristics such as human capital, the available labor supply, and access to infrastructure vary by work outcome. In general, the factors that contribute to more secure, relatively higher‐paying work differ from those important in understanding patterns of lower‐paying, daily wage work. We find that on‐farm social capital, measured as the presence of a co‐resident on the property who works off the farm, increases an individual's probability of working off the farm, but has a stronger effect for lower‐wage work. We also find that the farm owner's relationship to households on the farm property plays a significant role in predicting patterns of off‐farm work. These findings suggest that social capital plays an important role in providing access to employment and therefore to cash income, but that farm‐level social capital does not necessarily provide pathways to stable or high‐paying jobs outside agriculture.
ISSN:0036-0112
1549-0831
DOI:10.1111/j.1549-0831.2012.00094.x