The Prevalence and Characteristics of Labor Trafficking in Brazilian Agriculture

ABSTRACT Labor trafficking is thought to be disproportionately prevalent in global agriculture, but a lack of representative microdata measuring it impedes effective evidence-based policies to protect workers. In this paper, we report new evidence on the prevalence of labor trafficking from a large representative survey of agricultural households in four Brazilian states with substantial agriculture. We find that different estimation methods – probability sampling proportional to size (PPS) and the network scale-up method (NSUM) – and definitions yield prevalence estimates that range from 1.75% to 5.4% of agricultural workers, implying that between 264,000 and 815,000 Brazilian agricultural workers nationwide have been trafficked at some point within the preceding five years. Importantly, we also find that nearly 95% of all workers experience at least one exploitative employment practice related to trafficking, even when not meeting established definitions of trafficking. In general, these results suggest that labor trafficking is more prevalent in Brazilian agriculture than past estimates imply (particularly in the cocoa sector), and that the extent of worker exploitation is substantially understated by standard binary definitions of trafficking.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Human Trafficking

• Publication date

  2025-10-02

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/23322705.2025.2567787
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• A Review of Prevalence Estimation Methods for Human Trafficking Populations

  2022cited by this paper
• Global estimates of modern slavery : forced labour and forced marriage

  2022cited by this paper
• A State-Level Analysis of Demographic Characteristics and Sex Trafficking Experiences of Survivors

  2022cited by this paper
• Are women not enslaved in Brazil? A data-driven analysis of gender dynamics in Brazilian antislavery efforts

  2022cited by this paper
• The Prevalence and Correlates of Labor and Sex Trafficking in a Community Sample of Youth Experiencing Homelessness in Metro-Atlanta

  2021cited by this paper
• Typologies of Forced Labor Exploitation in Brazil

  2021cited by this paper
• Failing victims? Challenges of the police response to human trafficking

  2019cited by this paper
• Human trafficking and exploitation: A global health concern

  2017cited by this paper
• Slavery in Today’s Brazil: Law and Public Policy

  2017cited by this paper
• Improving the Network Scale-Up Estimator: Incorporating Means of Sums, Recursive Back Estimation, and Sampling Weights

  2015cited by this paper
• How Many People Do You Know?: Efficiently Estimating Personal Network Size

  2010influential reference
• Estimation of Seroprevalence, Rape, and Homelessness in the United States Using a Social Network Approach

  1998cited by this paper
• A social network approach to estimating seroprevalence in the United States

  1998cited by this paper
• The Bayesian Bootstrap

  1981cited by this paper
• A Generalization of Sampling Without Replacement from a Finite Universe

  1952influential reference
• Consistent Estimates Based on Partially Consistent Observations

  1948cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.