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Employment in Agriculture

Around one-quarter of the world’s labor force work in agriculture. In many low-to-middle-income countries, the majority work in farming and rely on it as their primary source of income.

A few centuries ago, this was the reality in rich countries too.

As countries get richer, the share of the population working in agriculture tends to decline as people move towards employment in industry and services.

Even among farmers, there are very large differences in incomes and productivity levels. The value added per worker can vary as much as ten-fold between countries.

On this page, you find our data and visualizations on employment in agriculture.

Interactive Charts on Employment in Agriculture

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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Max Roser (2023) - “Employment in Agriculture” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-employment-in-agriculture,
    author = {Max Roser},
    title = {Employment in Agriculture},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2023},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture}
}
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