A groundbreaking study by the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (Fiesp) and the Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics (Cepea/Esalq-USP) reveals that the employed population in São Paulo's agribusiness sector reached 4.34 million workers in 2024, registering a slight growth of 0.3% compared to the previous year. This segment represents 15.3% of the employed population in Brazilian agribusiness and 17.2% of the employed population of the entire state of São Paulo, indicating the sector's relevance in the São Paulo labor market. According to the survey "Labor Market of Agribusiness in the State of São Paulo," among the agribusiness segments, the only one with a positive balance in the number of employed people was the agro-industry (+9.2%), which increased its workforce by 91,450 people. “This amount was able to more than compensate for the losses that occurred in the other segments and generate a positive balance of 11,395 people employed in the state's agribusiness sector,” explains the director of the Agribusiness Department of Fiesp, Roberto Betancourt. This growth was mainly driven by the pasta and other industries (+43,410), wooden furniture (+10,791), natural-based textiles (+9,981), animal slaughter (+9,556) and beverages (+9,134). The agro-services segment, although it did not present the largest relative drop (-2.3%), was responsible for the largest absolute loss in agribusiness, with a negative balance of 51,523 people employed between 2023 and 2024, driven by trade activities (-26,658) and transport, storage and mail (-4,858). The input sector experienced a 1.7% decrease in the number of people employed between 2023 and 2024, equivalent to a total of 2,129 people. Among the activities that make up the input sector, the largest decreases occurred in agricultural machinery (-6,016) and fertilizers (-1,967). On the other hand, animal feed production increased its employed population by 5,544 people. The primary sector was responsible for the largest relative decrease (-3.9%) in the period, reducing the number of employed people by 26,403, with notable declines in activities such as sugarcane (-5,557), horticulture (-5,468), and soybeans (-5,334). Modest growth was identified in fishing and aquaculture (+3,773), certified seed and seedling production (+3,215), grapes (+2,305), and flowers and ornamental plants (+1,073). Agro-services and agro-industry are the segments with the largest share of the employed population. Regarding the distribution of the employed population among the segments, agro-industry accounted for 25% of this share, with 1.1 million people – although it registered a 10% reduction in its share, equivalent to three percentage points less than the 2012 level (when it represented 27% of the total employed). The segment with the largest share of the employed population in 2024 was agro-services, with 51% of the total or 2.23 million workers, showing little fluctuation throughout the historical series. The primary sector represented 15% of the employed population in 2024, a proportion that indicates a sharper decline: a reduction of 22%, or 4 percentage points, compared to the 2012 percentage (19%). In 2024, this sector, or São Paulo's agricultural sector, employed 653,000 workers. The input sector, despite having increased its share during the period, remained the least representative, with 3% of the employed population in 2024, or 124,000 people employed. Above it was self-consumption, whose share grew between 2012 and 2019 and, since then, has remained stable at 6% of the total. The composition of the employed population (EP) in São Paulo's agribusiness, as well as its GDP, highlights a structural characteristic of the sector in the state: the predominance of segments outside the farm gate. In contrast to the national scenario—in which agriculture accounts for 46% of jobs, and agribusiness for 16.8% of the total—São Paulo's agribusiness shows a significantly higher share of agribusiness, reflecting a more industrialized production profile. :: Largest share of the employed population has formal employment contracts. The number of employees with formal employment contracts represented the largest share of the employed population in São Paulo's agribusiness in 2024, at 55% of the total. However, this category lost 5 percentage points of participation in the agribusiness population between 2012 and 2024, after experiencing significant variations in the total number of workers. The number of workers without formal employment contracts fluctuated throughout the series, with declines during the pandemic and a new peak in 2023, followed by a drop in 2024. Despite the fluctuations, this category has maintained its share of the employed population, which hovers around 11% of the total, throughout the series. “This behavior indicates that the degree of formalization of work in São Paulo's agribusiness has remained slightly above 80% over the years analyzed,” points out Betancourt. In Brazilian agribusiness, in 2024, the degree of formalization was approximately 67%, while employees without formal contracts and the population employed exclusively for self-consumption represented, respectively, 15.26% and 17.85% of the sector's workforce. Employers have also maintained a stable share of the total employed population in the sector, around 5% throughout the historical series, with a total of 184,700 employers in 2024, a number 6.1% lower than the previous year and 9.9% higher than that recorded in 2012. This category represented 4% of the employed population in 2024. The second largest category in the employed population is the self-employed, which increased its representation from 16% in 2012, when it registered a total of 678,100 people, to 21% in 2024, reaching a total of 908,500 employed people, the second highest figure in the series for the category. During this period, the self-employed category experienced a growth of 34%. The categories of unpaid family workers and self-consumption showed opposite trends throughout the series, with a 36.5% reduction in the number of unpaid family workers and a 127% increase for self-consumption. In 2024, they represented 3% and 6% of the total employed population, equivalent to 126,200 and 244,200 employed people, respectively. Workers with higher education already make up 27% of the total employed population. According to Fiesp's survey, the trend of increasing educational attainment among employed individuals continued between 2023 and 2024. The number of workers without schooling decreased by 14.9% (-11,396 people), and the employed population with primary education decreased by 1.9% (19,251 fewer employed people). "This reduction in the categories with lower levels of education is associated with the absolute and relative increase in the number of employed people with higher levels of schooling," highlights Betancourt. "This trend is not exclusive to the state of São Paulo; the same behavior has been observed in Brazilian agribusiness," adds the businessman. The number of people employed with a high school education in agribusiness increased by 0.7% between 2023 and 2024, an increase of 13,965 people, representing almost half (49%) of the entire employed population in agribusiness in 2024. The group of people employed with a higher education, in turn, had the largest relative and absolute growth between 2023 and 2024 (+2.5%), increasing the population by 28,077 people with higher education and representing 27% of the total employed population in 2024. :: Growing female presence The work developed by Fiesp shows that the number of employed women grew by 1.6% (+27,771 people) between 2023 and 2024, while the male population decreased by 0.6% (-16,376 people) during the same period. “The inclusion of women in the labor market in São Paulo's agribusiness is an ongoing phenomenon, but it is occurring slowly, as activities traditionally performed by men, such as those carried out 'within the farm gate' [planting, harvesting, crop management], are losing ground to functions more related to agricultural services, in which women occupy a larger space,” observes the director of the Agribusiness Department of Fiesp. The female presence in agribusiness has grown consistently, driven by the greater inclusion of women in activities outside the farm gate, especially in agro-industry and agricultural services. Data indicate that female participation is advancing at a faster rate than male participation, with a higher accumulated growth rate for women between 2012 and 2024 (8.8% compared to 2.1% for the male population). In 2024, 2.61 million men and 1.73 million women were registered in the agribusiness sector of the state of São Paulo.
This text was translated by machine from Brazilian Portuguese.