A better educated farm workforce would be better able to prevent or mitigate food loss whether it is by identifying crop diseases early and knowing how to treat them or planning and executing appropriate logistics and distribution operations.
The dearth of a new generation of jimadores is symptomatic of a widespread decline in agricultural work in Mexico, with figures showing that the farm workforce fell by two million between 1995 and 2010, while pay for agricultural jobs has remained relatively static.
Although women make up 80% of the farming workforce, men are five times as likely to own land.
Jobs growth since Mr LePage took over has been disappointing: Maine has added a net 8,000 jobs out of a total non-farm workforce of 600,000.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 12.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States, or 8.5percentnt of the total non-farm workforce.
That, says Mr Adesina, is why 45% of Nigeria's tomatoes are ruined every day.Women, who make up a good half of the farming workforce, are often forced into farming by marriage.
It's popular media – including The Vicar of Dibley – that continue to stereotype twee villages, inhabited by bucolic locals, where everyone farms (in fact, UK Agriculture records that in 2006 Britain's farming workforce totalled just 184,000).
"[Former President Olusegun] Obasanjo got us all to grow cassava," says Yusuf Tsunbuji, a Taraba farmer, "and we ended up using it as firewood".Another snag is that the farming workforce is ageing, though 70% of Nigerians are younger than 30.
Osiel ended up in Ohio by following a generation of indigenous Guatemalans, who have been the backbone of Case Farms' workforce since 1989, when a manager drove a van down to the orange groves and tomato fields around Indiantown, Florida, and came back with the company's first load of Mayan refugees.
Expectations in terms of liveability are increasingly expressed by farmers within a context of society and market pressures on production processes and deep changes in farming itself (size of farms, workforce, off-farm activities, etc)., meaning that working conditions and the effectiveness of work organisation are critical issues today.
