Food supply resilience and migrant workers

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted economies and labor markets, including sectors such as agriculture that employ internal and international migrant workers. The resilience of the supply of farm workers, its ability to recover from and adapt to unexpected shocks, was cushioned in the short term by making exceptions to lockdown regulations, such as exempting essential workers from stay-at-home orders and allowing temporary migrant workers to cross otherwise closed borders to fill seasonal farm jobs. This paper explores the resilience of agricultural subsectors that rely on migrant workers, laying out short- and medium-term options to increase their resilience to a pandemic or similar shocks. In the short term, when the demand for labor is relatively fixed or inelastic, the major options are to induce local workers to substitute for missing migrant workers or to make exceptions to international mobility restrictions and admit temporary migrant workers to fill seasonal farm jobs. In the medium term, governments can influence the demand for migrant workers by subsidizing or taxing labor-saving mechanization, raising or lowering the cost of temporary migrant workers, and using trade policies to encourage or discourage imports of labor-intensive commodities.With the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Unio