Nature of employment in the food processing sector.

Abstract

An attempt to assess the employment potential of the food processing sector, while examining the nature of employment and the quality of work. A field study conducted to detail the wages, conditions of workers, employment security, social security, gender bias, etc, in mango jelly and pickle making in the unorganised segment and fish processing and cashew processing in the factory sector in Andhra Pradesh brings out several problems in the quality of employment. The average wage of these workers is only 48% of the statutory minimum. Women, who are the major victims, working under poor conditions without any social security, earn only half of what their male counterparts do. Meanwhile, it is also found out that some of the food processing jobs are denied to the scheduled castes, which suggests discrimination on the basis of caste. has been some optimism about the growth potential and possibilities of employment creation in the food processing sector in the country. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan notes that food processing is a sunrise sector and is highly labour-intensive, and proposes policies and programmes to encourage the growth of food processing along with other sectors such as leather products, footwear, textiles, tourism and construction to create additional employment opportunities to the tune of 65 million during the plan period (goi 2006: 74). Since the share of women in this sector is traditionally large, the growth of this sector is expected to contribute towards women's employment. The higher income elasticity of processed food products, increasing nuclear families, raising participation of women in the labour force leading to higher opportunity cost of time and changing dietary patterns due to globalisation are mainly responsible for accelerating the growth of this sector (Dev and Rao 2005). On the supply-side, the development of organised food retail1 as well as rise in the global value chains (Gereffi 2001; Wilkinson and Rocha 2006) for the processed food industry contributes to this. The rate of growth in this sector between 1981-82 and 2003-04 is 6.62% per annum and very impressive. It may accelerate further in view of the above factors as well as state intervention. However, the evolution of this sector has varied across countries and proper planning based on information about both the demand and supply aspects that affect its growth, in particular, the nature of employment and the workforce, is required (ilo 1998). Past studies indicate that, while being a high employment generating sector, there are concerns about the quality of work in food processing, especially in developing countries. In spite of untapped potential for growth and known labour-intensive character of this production, there are very few systematic studies on the sector, especially in the vast informal segment. The wages and conditions of work in the sector are largely undocumented compared to workers in other sectors like garments, etc. In this background, this paper tries to track the employment potential of this sector, while examining the nature and quality of work of women and men. The industries in the manufacture of food and beverages are included under food processing as per the international norms in this paper and tobacco industries are excluded except for some specific ratios. The structure and nature of employment in the food processing sector have been analysed from the data of the Annual Survey of Industries (asi) and the reports on unorganised manufacturing segment of the National Sample Survey Organisation (nsso). All the monetary values have been deflated with the wholesale price indices of the corresponding sub-sector. The growth rates presented in this paper are based on semi-log trend, This paper is a part of the larger study entitled Enhancing Growth and Productive Employment Linkages in the Food Processing Sector done for the International Labour Organisation, New Delhi. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for useful comments.

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