Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey suggested that the agriculture sector saw significant job losses in the last few years. However, the latest BFAP Agricultural Employment Brief for 2022 pointed to job growth.
According to the BFAP, the QLFS shows no clear methodology in the weighting of its surveys, and Stats SA’s reporting may also have been affected by varying survey responses in light of the pandemic and a continued lower-than-normal response rate.
“While there was a noticeable improvement in the past year with total survey responses of around 62,700 in the past quarter, this is still 7% lower than the average number of responses recorded in 2019,” said BFAP.
In 2016, the QLFS and Agricultural Survey had more or less the same level of farm workers, at around 736,000, the group said. “Since then, the jobs reported between these two sources started to diverge significantly, most notably in 2020, whereby the Annual Survey recorded an employment total that was 15% higher than that of the QLFS.”
BFAP noted that an upward trend in employment is not guaranteed to continue indefinitely, however.
Source: businesstech.co.za