Publication: Integrating Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia’s Agri-Food Sector
Date
2020-12-11
ISSN
Published
2020-12-11
Author(s)
Abstract
By the end of August 2020, five years
since the intensification of the Venezuelan humanitarian
crisis, 5.2 million Venezuelans had fled their country, in
an exodus whose scale and pace closely mirror those of the
Syrian refugee crisis - where by 2015, four years into the
forced displacement crisis, 4.8 million people had escaped
Syria. In the immediate aftermath of the surge in the number
of Venezuelan migrants, the focus of the Colombian
government was to register all migrants and provide relief
through health and welfare systems. This report is intended
to reach a broad audience of policy makers, program
administrators, development professionals, and academics in
Colombia and in the broader development community, and aims
to assesses the integration of Venezuelan migrants into
Colombian agri-food labor markets through a combination of
original micro-level data analysis and in-depth
semi-structured field interviews with Venezuelan migrants,
producers’ associations, and Colombian institutions. The
main contributions of the study are three-fold. First, the
report offers a detailed overview of Venezuelan migration
into Colombia, spatially and over time, enriching with new,
and more detailed, insights the currently available
information on migrants’ employment outcomes and on their
comparison to those of the local Colombian population. A
second contribution of the report is to provide evidence
that the agri-food sector in Colombia has a yet unfulfilled
potential to support a smoother inclusion of Venezuelan
migrants in the labor force. The third and final
contribution of the report is to identify lessons learned
for the inclusion of Venezuelan migrants in the agri-food
sector in Colombia. The report concludes with a look at the
path ahead, through practical ideas and operationalization
principles for delivering a strategy that includes both
supply and demand driven integration of migrants in labor
markets, featuring agriculture and food systems more prominently.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Sebastian, Ashwini Rekha; Perego, Viviana Maria Eugenia; Munoz Mora, Juan Carlos. 2020. Integrating Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia’s Agri-Food Sector. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34928 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”