WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL CA #347 - How much does a farmer earn?, informal recycling workers and other economic news (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 How much does a farmer earn? ---- I intentionally use the word "farmer"

and not "peasant". These are in fact the figures from national
accounting, which considers farms as agricultural holdings, i.e.
businesses. The average available balance, which must be used to pay the
farmer and invest, was 21,400 euros in 2020, or 1,783 euros per month.
To get an idea of the income that this leaves them, we would also need
to know the amount of necessary investments, which must be deducted from
it. But above all, it is an average, and the incomes of farmers are
particularly dispersed, especially in viticulture and market gardening
(it is in these two areas that we find both the richest and the poorest).
Please note that since INSEE considers farmers as business owners,
certain expenses are deducted to calculate their income. An employee who
buys a car to go to work, that's their business, it doesn't change the
amount of their salary. A business owner, therefore a farmer, who buys a
car for work, it's deducted from their declared profit. This complicates
comparisons considerably.
Depending on the year, subsidies represent between half and a third of
the added value. Added value is the difference between sales and
intermediate consumption, in other words purchases (fuel, fertilizer,
seeds, etc.), so it is the wealth created by the farm. You still have to
remove taxes, rents and any personnel costs as well as depreciation and
financial charges to arrive at a surplus (or a loss). Subsidies
therefore represent a very significant part of the average income of
farmers.
But if we want to know the standard of living of farmers, we must take
into account the entire family (its size) and especially additional
income. Indeed, agricultural profits represent on average only a third
of the disposable income of agricultural households. 30% of farmers also
have a salaried activity. In the end, agricultural profits represent
less than half of the income regardless of the income bracket
considered. The least wealthy live mainly on the income from their other
activities, for the richest 10%, it is the income from assets that
exceeds their agricultural income.
In 2020, the median standard of living of people living in a farming
household (22,800 euros) was close to that of the population as a whole
(22,400 euros). Be careful, this is no longer an average, it is a
median: half earn less, half earn more. It is more realistic than the
average. The poverty rate for people living in a farming household was
16.2%, compared to 14.4% for the population as a whole. Conversely, the
richest 10% of farmers are on average richer than the richest 10% of the
population.
Source: INSEE Blog, Etienne Apers, Felix Paquier, Isabelle Robert-Bovée,
Vincent Marcus, How much does a farmer earn?, December 12, 2024

Behind recycling, informal workers
Plastic recycling and waste management actually affect millions of
people in Asia, South America, and Africa. These are the workers who
recover, reuse, or resell plastics, textiles, aluminum, and other
valuable materials from waste. They are not officially recognized and
are generally derided in political speeches in cities and states.
Environmental regulations often exacerbate their precarity by
accelerating the privatization of waste treatment. A group of waste
pickers tried to take advantage of the opening of negotiations for the
global treaty on plastic waste pollution (which failed) to advocate for
recognition of their work.
Most circular economy and inclusive recycling policies rely on market
mechanisms, based on the premise that creating markets for waste will
incentivize market actors to efficiently recover waste and convert it
into resources. To meet their obligations, brands can then commit to
purchasing recycled plastics and to financing waste collection by
purchasing plastic credits. These market-based mechanisms exacerbate
existing inequalities in market access. Efforts to prioritise
traceability and transparency - with the aim of improving market
efficiency and regulatory compliance - disadvantage informal workers.
The latter do not have the resources and technical capacities to adopt
complex tracking systems based on GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
or blockchain (digital technology for storing and transmitting
information without a central authority), and find themselves excluded
from formalized processes. Start-ups financed by venture capital and
large companies are then taking over the recycling sector. Obviously, it
is not the highly qualified employees of these start-ups who sort the
waste. But they have a monopoly on market access, imposing their
conditions on real recycling workers. Current systems of plastic
production and consumption therefore shift the burden of waste onto
marginalized indigenous or ethnic communities, thus creating sacrifice
zones. It is the completely polluted areas that receive the waste, and
in which informal workers in this sector live. Source: December 1, 2024,
Waste pickers, big losers in the dominant narrative on plastic
pollution, Manisha Anantharaman,

Job insecurity has doubled in 40 years
Precarious work is all forms of fixed-term contracts, which also include
temporary work and apprenticeship contracts, as opposed to permanent
work. 7% of jobs were on precarious contracts in the early 1980s,
compared to 16% in 2023. In fact, their proportion increased very
quickly from the early 1980s to the year 2000, then continued to
increase but less quickly, and has stabilized since around 2020 (with of
course a dip during COVID). Of course, this is an average. Those most
affected by precarious contracts are the less educated and young people.
Among those under 25, the precariousness rate rose from 19% of employees
in 1982 to 49% in 1999. It has since exceeded 50%, reaching 59% in 2016.
It has fallen slightly since 2017 and now stands at 56%. This change is
partly explained by the expansion of apprenticeships. Women remain
slightly more precarious than men (16.6% compared to 15.2%), but the gap
between the two sexes has narrowed considerably. It should be noted that
the reduction in unemployment has clearly not led to a recovery in
permanent contracts.
Source: Observatoire des inégalités, 8 November 2024

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