Social protection schemes for agriculture workers
Guidance for companies, farmers, and workers
Companies should implement human rights due diligence (HRDD) processes in their agricultural supply chains, such as striving to provide living income and wages, ensuring workers’ access to safe and healthy workplace conditions, and protecting labor rights. However, even the most thorough HRDD programs cannot control for every external factor that affects workers’ well-being.
Agricultural communities often experience fluctuations in commodity prices, impacting farmers’ and workers’ incomes. In addition, climate change, natural disasters, pests, and disease can wipe out an entire season’s harvest or cause long-term damage to a farm’s production capacity.
While full-time employment can offer workers with more stable and long-term income, these jobs can be hard to secure. Many businesses in upstream agricultural supply chains find it difficult to offer full-time employment to all of their workers due to the seasonal nature of production and fluctuating labor needs; harvests often take place during specific times of the year with unexpected weather events and crop diseases shifting the timing and volume of any given harvest.
In agricultural supply chains where individual companies’ influence may be limited, it is critical for small farmers and farm workers to have access to social protection programs. These schemes are typically government-run, national programs that support individuals and/or households across three categories:
- Contributory schemes, including social insurance or pensions, where individuals pay a certain amount towards the program to receive benefits;
- Non-contributory schemes that provide cash or in-kind benefits to address specific issues such as illness, crop damage, and natural disasters; and
- Supplemental programs designed to support vulnerable groups.
These schemes complement the efforts of committed supply chain partners, ensuring workers have access to legally-required benefits and progress toward a living wage.
Gaps in existing resources
Despite the importance of social protection programs, we have identified a gap in resources dedicated to helping farmers, farm workers, and companies with agricultural supply chains understand available schemes, their requirements, and their benefits.
There is a clear and consistent need for more information about social protection programs. Most on-site assessments at farms find that farmers and workers lack a social safety net, especially in smallholder settings. Seventeen out of 20 small farm assessments we conducted in 2024 and 2025 indicated that workers lacked access to social security or had not enrolled in available programs. This represents a significant labor issue, as we require our members to ensure that workers in their supply chains have access to legally-mandated benefits.
In this guidance document, we address the challenges that farmers and workers face in accessing social protection, including constraints due to location, income levels, and program implementation, and how companies can help improve access to these programs. We have also compiled research on 23 existing social protection programs for vulnerable groups, such as people experiencing poverty, seniors, children, pregnant and lactating women, migrant workers, small farmers, or farmers facing losses due to climate change, natural disasters, or life events.