The impact of climate variability on agricultural employment in Mexico from 1980–2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE The impact of climate variability on agricultural employment in Mexico from 1980–2017 Karla Arlae Sa´nchez GuijosaID1,2*, Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo1, Mario Martı´nez Salgado3 1 Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´ xico (UNAM), Morelia, Michoaca´ n, Mexico, 2 Posgrado en Ciencias de la Sostenibilidad, Universidad Nacional Auto´ noma de Me´xico (UNAM), Morelia, Michoaca´ n, Mexico, 3 Unidad de Investigacio´ n sobre Representaciones Culturales y Sociales, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico (UNAM), Morelia, Michoaca´n, Mexico * aguijosa@cieco.unam.mx Abstract Employment in the agricultural sector is highly dependent on climate. Most agricultural jobs worldwide rely on predictable precipitation, in terms of both quantity and seasonality. Mexico is a largely agrarian country, with at least 20 million people directly reliant on food production for the livelihoods. However, research on the relationship between climate variability and agrarian employment is limited in the nation, complicating the development of effective adaptation strategies to drought and climate change. This study aims to address this gap, by analyzing the employment changes of farmers and livestock producers at a national level in the past five decades (1980 to 2017) and its relationship to long-term precipitation variabil- ity. We employed governmental datasets from national agrarian surveys and national pre- cipitation, both at the annual scale and seasonally within each year. We found a negative

relationship between agricultural employment and total annual precipitation. In particular, employment in the livestock sector showed a negative correlation with current-year precipi- tation (p = 0.06, cor = -0.33), while employment in rainfed agriculture was linked to the previ- ous year’s rainfall (p = 0.07, cor = -0.33). It is likely that this pattern was driven by the positive relationship of precipitation with planted cropland area (p<0.05, cor = 0.19) and agrarian income (p<0.05, cor = 0.18). We also found that as many as 10 million people left the agrarian employments each year during the dry season. Finally, as precipitation contin- ues to pose a challenge, it may have contributed to people of ages 23 to 35 to leave in recent years, compared to 15 and 19 in the 1990s. These findings underscore the need for national policies to mitigate the impacts of dry years on livelihoods and to inform strategies for build- ing resilience in the agricultural sector. 1. Introduction Modern agriculture and the livelihoods of rural farmers remain highly dependent on climate. In recent years, studies have attributed the changes in crop yield variability to climate change PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313891 February 10, 2025 1 / 22 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Sa´nchez Guijosa KA, Murray-Tortarolo G, Martı´nez Salgado M (2025) The impact of climate variability on agricultural employment in Mexico from 1980–2017. PLoS ONE 20(2): e0313891. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313891

Editor: Fabien Muhirwa, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG), CHINA Received: March 11, 2024 Accepted: November 1, 2024 Published: February 10, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Sa´nchez Guijosa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data relevant to this study are available on Zenodo at https://doi. org/10.5281/zenodo.13686199. Data on yield and income were obtained from the following sources: https://nube.siap.gob.mx/cierreagricola/ (SIAP), https://www.inegi.org.mx/app/indicesdeprecios/ CalculadoraInflacion.aspx (INEGI Inflation Calculator). Original data are accessible through the following sources: https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/ cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.06/crucy.2205251923.v4. 06/countries/pre/ (CRU), https://www.inegi.org. mx/programas/eder/2017/ (EDER), https://www. inegi.org.mx/programas/enoe/15ymas/ (ENOE),