A global shift towards healthier, more sustainable eating patterns could reshape agricultural employment across the world, according to new research from the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute (ECI).
The global food system is under growing scrutiny for its environmental and health impacts. It contributes substantially to climate change, biodiversity loss, and diet-related disease, making its current trajectory unsustainable.
Rising public awareness of these costs is beginning to shift habits and policies alike: plant-based diets are gaining traction among consumers and governments seeking to address both climate and health imperatives.
Yet food systems are also social and economic lifelines, employing hundreds of millions of people worldwide, particularly in livestock production. Transforming how the world eats will inevitably reshape how we produce food.
The new study , published in The Lancet Planetary Health and led by Dr Marco Springmann , senior researcher at the ECI , alongside co-authors Professor Michael Obersteiner , director of the ECI ; Dr Yiorgos Vittis, an agricultural and food economist; and Professor Sir Charles Godfray , director of the Oxford Martin School, examines how dietary patterns such as flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian and vegan diets would affect the number of people working to grow, raise and harvest food in 179 countries.
Dietary change doesn't just affect our health and the planet - it also has a big impact on people's livelihoods. Moving away from meat-heavy diets reduces the need for labour in animal production but increases demand in horticulture and food services. Consistent strategies and political support will be needed to enable just transitions both into and out of agricultural labour.
Dr Marco Springmann , Environmental Change Institute
By combining detailed data on labour requirements for crops and livestock with models of global food production, the researchers estimated how dietary changes could affect the agricultural workforce.
They found that adopting more plant-based diets could reduce global agricultural labour needs by 5-28 per cent (equivalent to 18-106 million full-time jobs) by 2030, mainly due to lower demand for livestock production.
At the same time, around 18-56 million additional full-time workers could be needed in horticulture to produce fruits, vegetables, legumes and other plant-based foods.
Overall, these changes could reduce global labour costs by US $290-995 billion per year (adjusted for purchasing power parity), equal to around 0.2-0.6 per cent of global GDP.
While these shifts could bring efficiency gains, the study emphasises the need for policy and planning to ensure that transitions are fair.
Measures such as retraining, redeployment and investment in horticultural production will be crucial to support workers and rural communities as food systems evolve.
Read the full paper in The Lancet Planetary Health: Labour requirements for healthy and sustainable diets at global, regional, and national levels: a modelling study.
