Recent transformations in rural societies and agricultural production reflect multiple vectors of change that are advancing with varying intensities and directions. These processes generate a decoupling between rural and agricultural life, reconfigure the rural-urban relationship, and reorganize food chains. Digital and environmental transitions permeate these dynamics (Camarero, de Grammont, and Quaranta, 2020).

Information technologies open new avenues for integration into labor markets and social networks, but their deployment is conditioned by the digital divide, which reproduces and deepens inequalities between territories and among rural individuals. Digitalization transforms social and productive organization, accentuating the fragmentation between farmers and agricultural wage earners (Olmedo Neri, 2025).

The economic and health crisis, exacerbated in the years following the pandemic, exposed structural deficiencies in access to goods and services and reaffirmed the need for situated research on the diverse rural spaces of Latin America. Added to this are sociodemographic changes—aging, low fertility, reduced household size, and depopulation—that are transforming life strategies, labor market integration, and the distribution of care work (de Grammont, 2021; Quaranta, 2020; Contreras, 2017). At the same time, climate change is increasing the vulnerability of rural households and agricultural workers through income loss, forced diversification of activities, food insecurity, and increased labor migration.

These processes are linked to broader transformations in the world of work, which consolidate inequalities within a new global agri-food regime characterized by a more unjust international division of labor, institutional changes, and a profound reconfiguration of power relations (McMichael, 2015; Friedman, 2005; Niederle and Wesz, 2018). The concentration of productive resources and common goods in large agri-food corporations shapes “fragmented ruralities” (Gras, 2019; Quaranta, 2017) and deepens the subordination of agrarian economies on a global scale, with consequences for food insecurity and the overexploitation of natural resources and labor (Gudynas, 2017; Svampa, 2019).

The increasing wage-earning of small producers and landless rural populations expands the segments of impoverished rurality (Reinecke and Faiguenbaum, 2016). New forms of labor intermediation increase mobility and precariousness, with differentiated impacts according to class, ethnicity, and gender (Lara and Sánchez, 2015; D'Aubeterre, 2019; Sampedro, 2022). Large sectors of rural origin face increasing difficulties in selling their labor, resulting in relative overpopulation. Family production and agricultural wage labor no longer sustain most households, which depend on combinations of precarious activities, multiple jobs, migration, and social transfers (Quaranta, 2023). In this context, women's work is central to reproduction strategies (Gras and Ramírez, 2025).

Labor mobility emerges as a key component of these strategies and as a privileged lens through which to analyze the relationship between the climate crisis, transformations in work, and rural ways of life. Studies by the Working Group show that the combination of wage labor and technological advances has generated few skilled jobs and has not improved the working conditions of the majority, who remain in situations of extreme vulnerability (Lara and Sánchez, 2015; de Moraes and Vasconcellos, 2020). This phase of agrarian capitalism is sustained by environmental degradation, the displacement of communities, and the exploitation of workers (Riella and Mascheroni, 2015; Salas, 2022).

The fragmentation of workers, exacerbated by digitalization and automation, impacts the organization, the production process, and job qualifications, generating new forms of control and debates about qualification/disqualification (Moraes Silva, 2025). This fragmentation weakens agricultural unionism by reducing cohesion, dispersing workers, and hindering collective action, thus forcing the development of new organizational strategies (Villulla, 2025).

Persistent precarity (Kay, 2016) keeps rural workers as politically invisible subjects, while weak regional institutions foster markedly asymmetrical labor relations (Lara and Sánchez, 2015; Marinakis, 2014). The pandemic highlighted the disproportionate impact of the crisis on popular sectors, accentuating inequalities and underscoring the importance of analyzing the social organization of care, especially in the labor trajectories of rural women (Artacker et al., 2020; Nobre, 2021).

Understanding rural inequalities requires considering ethnicity, race, gender, and generation, which mediate access to land, work, infrastructure, connectivity, and services (ECLAC, 2018; FAO, 2018). Previous research by the Working Group shows that rural labor markets are a central driver of the reproduction of vulnerabilities. This scenario poses urgent challenges for research and collective action.

The working group proposes to reflect on:

a) the vulnerability profiles and inequalities linkages of agricultural workers and their households, considering demographic and climate transformations;

b) the transformations of rural employment markets in Latin America, with emphasis on labor heterogeneity, digitalization, mobility and precariousness;

c) the relationships between agricultural work, gender and the social organization of care;

d) the responses of public policies and rural organizations to the new conditions of rurality and agricultural work.

Rural studies in Latin America have a long history of concern and interest in agricultural labor and social inequalities within it. A key academic forum for these debates is the Latin American Association of Rural Sociology (ALASRU), to which the vast majority of the Working Group members belong. This Working Group has its own sociological tradition in the study of labor processes and markets in agriculture, which constitutes an original contribution to international agrarian sociology.

At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, interest in exploring these issues in greater depth was renewed due to a new phase of capitalist penetration into agriculture within the framework of globalization processes. These processes brought about substantial transformations in the organization of production, agricultural labor, and the working lives of the rural population in general (Kay, 2009; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2012). However, many analysts argue that the period of neoliberal globalization is in crisis and, to a large extent, has come to an end. The pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and the rise of protectionist policies, within the context of disputes between the United States and China, have marked a shift toward a more fragmented world with greater state intervention. The end of neoliberal globalization opens a scenario of uncertainty, which gives us hope that political action will achieve a fairer social order for rural workers, but the structures of inequality inherited from neoliberalism remain a central challenge that is crystallizing and deepening in the new scenarios of the digital and environmental transition.

The digital transition in the post-globalization era is redefining economic and social dynamics. The fragmentation of global markets is intensifying. New forms of work and production are emerging, and technological sovereignty is becoming a central axis of geopolitical disputes. The hegemony of transnational corporations within the agribusiness regime dominates global food production and deepens inequalities in food systems. Specifically, digitalization is transforming agricultural work by introducing precision technologies, automation, and data management, which improves efficiency and sustainability but also creates risks of exclusion for small producers and workers with low digital skills.

The effects of digitalization on agriculture present us with a series of transformations that are very difficult to predict, although it is clear that traditional differences, both between agricultural and non-agricultural activities, and between rural and urban areas, are becoming less pronounced due to the increased integration of the social division of labor in the new contexts of capitalism. The rural-urban divide deepens the heterogeneity and fragmentation of inequalities among agricultural actors and rural territories. These inequalities are related to the lack of opportunities in rural areas, infrastructure and social service deficits, limited connectivity, and, in particular, the connection to the labor market.

For their part, studies on the nature and profile of the social subjects currently encompassed by forms of relative overpopulation are key to understanding increasingly broad segments of the rural world and agricultural production. The study of household reproduction strategies and the relationship between the state, the market, and the family is central to understanding these subjects. Research on gender relations and caregiving responsibilities is fundamental for a sound understanding of these phenomena.