Can pension systems be part of the fight for food sovereignty?

On 31 March 2025, workers from all sectors in Belgium held a general strike that shut down much of the country.¹ Picket lines were formed in work places like petrochemical companies, ports, airports, supermarkets, hospitals and potato processing plants. The day before, on the other side of the world, thousands of protestors marched in cities in Chile, while, two weeks earlier, huge numbers of protestors gathered in Buenos Aires despite the use of rubber bullets and mass arrests by the police.² There was no apparent coordination between these actions, so what brought so many people into the streets in different continents? A common struggle: the fight against cuts or reforms to retirement security systems being pushed by their governments.

Across the world, tensions are rising as governments, both left and right, push for pension reforms, like delaying the legal retirement age, to deal with ageing work forces and rising debts. This is not a new fight. Thirty years ago, the World Bank warmed that public pension systems were "nearing collapse" and needed to be replaced by private systems.³ It then used its structural adjustment programmes to privatise public pension systems and block any further development of public schemes in much of the global South.⁴

The result today is that most workers in the global South (and many in the global North) don't even have a pension that they can fight to protect. Half of the world’s elderly folk get no pension at all, and in low income countries the figure is just 20%.⁵ Retirees in the global South who do receive a pension get far less than what they need to survive, in large part because of policies imposed by the World Bank and other lenders.⁶

People in countries where workers generally have access to retirement security may be struggling to hold on to what they currently have. This is arguably the case in the US or Argentina right now, where privatisation and the gutting of the state by far right leaders are in motion. In other countries, people are actively pushing for improvements, like we see in Chile, Belgium or France. These are places where unions may be strong or progressive political parties, academics and civil society are making bold and solid proposals. But in much of the world, where governments are deep in debt and communities repressed, the notion of decent pensions for all is not even on the table.

The situation is particularly appalling for people working in the food system. As discussed below, across most of the global South, farmers and fishers are either without access to retirement security or only get paid a pittance. The majority of workers in other parts of the food system, from farmhands to market vendors, are in the same boat.

Fortunately, there are examples out there of global South countries where governments, usually pushed by strong social movements, have enacted public pension systems that work. Some even provide effective schemes designed for small farmers and their families. They may not be perfect, but social movements, including those fighting for food sovereignty, can draw upon them to challenge calls for cut backs and reforms, and advance the struggle for decent retirements for all.

Below we look at retirement systems in the global South for workers in the food system, with a specific focus on the situation for small farmers.

Across the world, people who work so hard to produce, prepare and distribute food are often struggling to feed themselves – both now and at the end of their working lives. Many are paid prices or wages that are too low, and face costs of living that are too high, to allow for any savings. Many food producers are also landless or without sufficient access to other resources to provide adequately for themselves and their families as they grow older. They also do not have access to decent social protections to deal with things like disability, health care or the loss of family members.

The retirement schemes that exist in the global South are mostly holdovers from the colonial period, where pensions were only provided by the state to certain categories of government employees. With independence, countries extended these state pensions to a larger base of government workers. They also provided incentives for private sector workers to contribute to either public or private pension plans. The thinking was that these systems would gradually cover the entire working population as economies industrialised and people moved from "informal" to "formal" work. But the reality is that so-called informal work continues to dominate in countries of the global South, and many farmers and other food systems workers may fall in this category.⁷

There is ample evidence – and it’s logical – that state-run pension systems that require workers to contribute earnings for payout later on, when they retire, are not effective for people in the informal economy. This is especially the case in rural areas. These systems are highly discriminatory towards women, too.⁸ Tunisia, for instance, has a decades-old state-run pension system that operates for farmers, fishers and agricultural workers, but only around 10 percent of them participate in it. For women, the figure is less than 1%!⁹ Next door, in Algeria, a similar system was extended to farmers in 1974, but by 2022 only 5,000 of them were enrolled.¹⁰

The World Bank and other proponents of such schemes argue that it is only a matter of finding the right mix of "behavioural nudges" to convince farmers and other workers in the informal economy to participate. Many governments are trying digital platforms and flexible schedules to get people to sign up and contribute.¹¹ But they are not having much success. Today, less than one in five workers in the global South pay into a pension plan.¹²

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a voluntary pension scheme in 2019. It is managed by the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation. Under this scheme, the government matches farmer contributions for their retirement savings. But while Modi was counting on 50 million farmers enrolling by 2021, less than two million had signed up by 2025 – 4% of the target. In the agricultural state of Punjab, a mere 14,615 farmers had joined.¹³

Such systems fail to enlist farmers and food workers because they rarely have savings to contribute. If they have anything left at the end of the month, it is most likely used to pay debts. Over half of all farming households in India, for example, are in serious debt and in no position to save, especially women.¹⁴

Another reason why it's difficult to attract small farmers to such systems is trust, and for good reason. Sri Lanka, for example, established a contributory farmer pension scheme in 1984 that was partially subsidised by the state.¹⁵ It grew to a million contributors by 2011, before it collapsed in debt and stopped making payments.¹⁶ A new scheme was launched in 2016, with four times higher contribution requirements, but it failed to get anywhere near the previous number of participants. Then, after Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt in 2022, the International Monetary Fund pressured Sri Lanka into a restructuring process that protected foreign holders of its external debt and penalised the national pension funds holding its domestic debt, including the farmer pension scheme.¹⁷

The good news is that there are examples of systems that provide dignified pensions to farmers and other food system workers that can be drawn from.

Brazil is perhaps the best example. Owing to a hard fight by social movements, the country's 1988 constitution recognises the right of rural people to equal social protections and enshrines the right of every Brazilian citizen to an old age pension at least equal to the national minimum wage. Flowing from these rights, Brazil established a unique pension scheme for small farmers and their families that benefits all women over 55 and all men over 60.¹⁸ The scheme is based on individual contributions made by deducting a small amount from what each farmer sells – which the buyer must collect and pay to the state, not the farmer. Further, the amount of pension that farmers get is not tied to the amounts they contributed during their work life. No matter how much is collected, the state provides retired small farmers with a monthly payment that is at least equal to the minimum wage. This is for both men and women in the same family. In reality, only about 10% of the rural pension is paid from farmer contributions, while the rest is paid by the state.¹⁹

Bolivia offers another example.²⁰ In 2009, the government enacted “Dignity income”. It is a pension scheme funded by taxes levied on fossil fuel production and the profits of state companies. It provides a significant, universal pension to over 90% of the population (93% of women), which people do not pay into. The scheme is guaranteed under the Constitution, which obliges the state to "provide a lifelong old age pension in the framework of the integrated social security system."²¹ In a way, it is similar to the pension scheme run in Norway, another fossil fuel giant.

Colombia will be enacting a similar scheme in July 2025 that will provide retirement payments to millions of small farmers and other workers in the informal economy.²² Also, in 2019, Mexico enshrined its universal “Older adult welfare pension” as a constitutional right for its citizens. In that process, it dropped the qualifying age from 68 to 65, expanded coverage to the whole country, and significantly increased the payout to US$180 per month. It also introduced an extra universal pension for women aged 60-65 to address gender inequalities.²³

South Africa is one of the few African countries with a decent retirement scheme that doesn’t rely on workers paying into it. While the programme is limited to low income households, three-quarters of all persons aged 60 or older in South Africa receive payments from the programme, making a critical contribution to both rural and urban families.²⁴

The government of China spent years experimenting with pension plans for rural communities until it realised that it would not work if it depended on people paying into them. So, in 2009, it changed direction and launched the “New rural social pension scheme”, a state-subsidised system. Workers can pay in, but most of the funding comes from the state, like in Brazil. Older people who are enrolled get a basic monthly payment, topped up with an additional amount based on whatever contributions they made. The scheme is immensely popular, and within a few years managed to enrol 460 million rural people.²⁵ Although the basic amount is still small and needs to be increased, the scheme is making a dent in rural poverty levels, particularly for elderly women. Studies even link it to a decrease in the consumption of junk food and cigarettes.²⁶

These systems work, but there are caveats. In each case, the subsidised scheme targeting small farmers is part of a much larger system that caters to workers in the formal sector. These larger systems have their own deficiencies and can have major negative impacts on working people.²⁷ Brazil's mainstream pension funds, for example, invest in agribusiness corporations like JBS, which is notorious for labour violations and its connections to land grabbing and deforestation.²⁸ Financial companies also lobby pension funds in the global South to participate in their high-risk investments. For example, in 2024, Thailand's US$77 billion national pension fund decided to put its money into private equity and other dubious schemes, while in March 2025 Brazil gave the green light to national pension funds to invest in a new, high-risk class of agribusiness funds.²⁹

Another weakness is that Brazil's system provides a significant pension for rural people, but nothing for informal sector workers in urban areas. There is thus no basis to build solidarity between small farmers producing food and the growing number of digital platform drivers delivering that food to people. Such disconnects were exploited by the right wing government of Jair Bolsonaro which managed to pass a number of pension reforms back in 2019.³⁰ While strong resistance from social movements succeeded in keeping the small farmer pension system in place, the government has since raised administrative requirements and bureaucratic hurdles to effectively discourage small farmers from participating.³¹

What clearly works best are subsidised schemes that provide all older people, including those who have worked in the food system, with a basic level of income in retirement without them having to contribute much during their working years.³² If the objective of a pension system is to truly support people in old age, there is no way around this.³³ Of course, funding this is a challenge and taxes on wealth and corporations have to play a role.

The World Bank and others will claim that such systems are unaffordable, and that they will collapse as populations in many countries become older. But this hides the political choice here. When Brazil's Small Farmers’ Movement fought against a set of neoliberal reforms to their pension system in 2017, they emphasised two things. First, they insisted that pensions should be a redistributive measure that provides a fair share of the country's wealth to women and rural families. Secondly, they pointed out that pensions should be linked to public investment, in the case of the rural pension, giving an economic boost to hundreds of municipalities.³⁴ If pension systems are in a deficit, then governments need to do more to collect revenues, whether through taxes on corporations or the wealthy. This framing is critical.

At a time when so much is being done to split workers and repress their power and rights, a fight for public pension schemes based on universality and solidarity provides a tremendous opportunity to bring workers together and make real improvements in people's lives.³⁵ Well organised retirement systems can not only provide dignity and security to elderly people, but also make a contribution to the larger struggle for food sovereignty.

1 Maïthé Chini, "General strike day: No flights from Brussels - only one metro running", Brussels Times, March 2025" https://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels-2/1509707/general-strike-day-only-one-metro-running-in-brussels-tbtb

2 "Bajo lluvia manifestantes reclaman en Chile el fin de los fondos privados de pensiones," AP, March 2025: https://apnews.com/article/chile-pensiones-b38e80b03b5b5413c11c8f6eeeedfb63; "Sube a 103 la cifra de detenidos y a 20 la de heridos en la protesta de jubilados en Argentina", EFE, March 2025: https://efe.com/economia/2025-03-12/jubilados-argentino-marcha-equipos-futbol/

3 World Bank, "Averting the Old Age Crisis", 1995: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/ar/973571468174557899/pdf/multi-page.pdf

4 Isabel Ortiz, Fabio Durán-Valverde, Stefan Urban and Veronika Wodsak, Reversing Pension Privatizations: Rebuilding public pension systems in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 2018: https://www.ilo.org/publications/reversing-pension-privatizations-rebuilding-public-pension-systems-eastern

5 Data from ILO's World Social Protection Data Dashboard: https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/WSPDB.action?id=19

6 Camila Arza, "The gender dimensions of pension systems", UN Women, 2015: https://socialprotection-humanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ARZA-Fin.pdf; HelpAge International, "HelpAge International’s comments on the right to social protection and the right to work of older people", March 2025: https://www.helpage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Older-peoples-right-to-social-protection-and-to-work.pdf

7 GRAIN and StreetNet International, "Social protection for market traders and street vendors in an era of pension fund capitalism," August 2023: https://grain.org/en/article/7033-social-protection-for-market-traders-and-street-vendors-in-an-era-of-pension-fund-capitalism

8 Camila Arza, "The gender dimensions of pension systems", UN Women, 2015: https://socialprotection-humanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ARZA-Fin.pdf

9Issam Lahmar et al., "Femmes travailleuses dans l’Agriculture: Inclusion, Réseautage, Émancipation", Nexus, December 2021: https://www.nexusemiliaromagna.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Agriculture-Travail-Droits_FINAL_LOGOS.pdf

10 Zouheyr Douakha, "GUELMA, CASNOS : plus près des agriculteurs", El Moudjahid, September 2022: https://www.elmoudjahid.dz/fr/regions/guelma-casnos-plus-pres-des-agriculteurs-189217

11 Examples include Rwanda's Ejo Heza scheme, Nigeria's Micro Pension Plan and the Senegalese public-private company SenAssuranceVie's Pack Secteur Informel (https://senassurancevie.sn/retraite/la-retraite-pour-les-travailleurs-informels-au-senegal-quelles-solutions/).

12 Data from ILO's World Social Protection Data Dashboard: https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/WSPDB.action?id=19

13 Suchak Patel, "How Pensions Fail the Common Man", IndiaSpend, January 2025: https://www.indiaspend.com/governance/how-pensions-fail-the-common-man-937856

14 Ibid.

15 Vindya Eriyagama and Ravi P. Rannan-Eliya, "Assessment of the Farmers’ and Fishermen’s Pension and Social Security Benefit Scheme in Sri Lanka Research team", IPS Sri Lanka, 2003: https://www.ips.lk/assessment-of-the-farmers-and-fishermens-pension-and-social-security-benefit-scheme-in-sri-lanka/

16 Bandula Sirimanna, "Farmers’ pension scheme collapses" Sunday Times, November 2011: https://www.sundaytimes.lk/111106/BusinessTimes/bt04.html

17 Jayati Ghosh and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, "Sri Lanka’s Dangerous Domestic Debt Restructuring", Project Syndicate: September 2023: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sri-lanka-government-imf-austerity-deal-will-exacerbate-debt-crisis-by-jayati-ghosh-and-kanchana-n-ruwanpura-2023-09

18 Júlia Lenzi Silva and Flávio Roberto Batista, "A previdência social sob a ótica da proteção às famílias: caminhando à beira do abismo" in Temas relevantes sobre o Direito das Famílias, ed. César Fiuza, D’Plácido Editora, 2019: https://www.editoradplacido.com.br/cdn/imagens/files/manuais/_temas-relevantes-sobre-o-direito-das-familias.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOooLEivmHTRcl3Jq-jfXNuD25GNdlcBOeEysMNFssxfcKRcIRurs

19 André Bongestabs, “A Proteção Social dos Trabalhadores Rurais na CPLP”, ILO, 2018: https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/Media.action;jsessionid=mrrVEskcBofAE2ESY6PHdZmUgQ-5Tf14jK8HmJpelb4GnCcWjK4T!-1542118223?id=16663

20 For a discussion of pension reforms in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, see: Leandro N. Carrera and Marina Angelaki, "Bringing Back the State: Understanding Varieties of Pension Re-reforms in Latin America", Latin American Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, December 2021: doi:10.1017/lap.2021.36

21 HelpAge International, "Redistribution of wealth and old age social protection in Bolivia", 2013: https://www.helpage.org/silo/files/redistribution-of-wealth-and-old-age-social-protection-in-bolivia.pdf

22 The scheme is not universal however. To qualify, people have to be considered in "extreme poverty or vulnerability". Betsabé Molero et al. "Reforma pensional: los cambios para los campesinos, mujeres y trabajadores informales", August 2024: https://consonante.org/noticia/reforma-pensional-los-cambios-para-los-campesinos-mujeres-y-trabajadores-informales/

23 US Social Security Administration, "Recent Developments in Foreign Public and Private Pensions", January 2025: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/intl_update/2025-01/2025-01.pdf

24 Family Caregiving, "Older persons care needs and social grants", 2024: https://tafta.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Older-Persons-Care-Needs-and-Social-Grants-Report.pdf

25 HelpAge International, "Pension coverage in China and the expansion of the New Rural Social Pension", https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/helpage/2013/en/97137

26 Lujie Fan and Jing Hua, "New rural pension scheme, intergenerational interaction and rural family human capital investments", Frontiers in Public Health: 2023: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1272069; Xiaobing Wang et al., "Richer and healthier? Social pension and unhealthy behavior in China," AgEcon, 2024: http://www.ccap.pku.edu.cn/docs/2024-01/20240105104242852676.pdf On recent developments with the scheme, see: NTV.CN, 2025年中央一号文件发力，农村养老保障按下“加速键”(The Central Government’s No. 1 Document 2025 emphasises the acceleration of rural pension), 28 February 2025: https://www.ntv.cn/content/1/429/991429386.html

27 GRAIN, Kevin Skerrett and A Growing Culture, "We need a movement to take pensions out of financial markets", September 2022: https://grain.org/e/6880

28 Cesar Raizer, "JBS CEO ordered to step aside in Brazil pension fund probe," Reuters, September 2016: https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-corruption-pensions/corrected-update-3-jbs-ceo-ordered-to-step-aside-in-brazil-pension-fund-probe-idUKL1N1BH0AA/

29 Panu Wongcha-um, "Thailand's pension fund earmarks $11.6 bln for global investment overhaul", Reuters, September 2024: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/thailands-pension-fund-earmarks-116-bln-global-investment-overhaul-2024-09-27/; "Setor agropecuário conquista avanço histórico com entrada dos FIAGROs nos fundos de pensão", Agëncia FPA, March 2025: https://agencia.fpagropecuaria.org.br/2025/03/28/setor-agropecuario-conquista-avanco-historico-com-entrada-dos-fiagros-nos-fundos-de-pensao/. For more on the Brazilian agribusiness funds, see: GRAIN, "Whipping up disaster: how Brazil became a lab for financial agro-investments," May 2024: https://grain.org/e/7138

30 Thiago Costa and Jay Wiggan, "The Bolsonaro Government’s 2019 pension reform in Brazil: a policy discourse analysis", Critical Policy Studies, December 2023: https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2023.2289065

31 Júlia Lenzi Silva, "Com nome e sobrenome: Eu, Daniel Blake como ferramenta de sensibilização no debate sobre o processo administrativo previdenciário", Teoria Jurídica Contemporânea, v.8 2023: https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/rjur/article/view/59441

32 The International Labour Organisation describes a "basic level" this way: "Flat-rate pensions – typically provided by non-contributory schemes – should guarantee that the provision offered is at least sufficient to maintain the family of the beneficiary in health and decency". https://www.ilo.org/media/359286/download

33 This is not only true for the global South. In the European Union, for example, the poverty rate for people over 65 would climb from 14 to 88 per cent if public pensions and other social transfers were removed. https://socialprotection-humanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ARZA-Fin.pdf

34 MPA, "Previdência Rural", March 2017: https://mpabrasil.org.br/artigos/artigo-previdencia-rural/

35 "Solidarity" in the sense of a redistribution of wealth and each generation supporting the pensions of another.