From Fields to Futures: The Lasting Effects of Crop Diseases on Education and Earnings

Abstract The economic literature has shown that exogenous transitory crop diseases affect education by changing the opportunity cost of children’s time. We argue that this is only part of the explanation. When permanent, crop diseases may change contracts and the organization of labor by eroding the productive structure and decreasing land values. This paper studies the long-term effects of a long-lasting environmental shock on individuals’ educational achievement and earnings. We investigate the 1988 witches’-broom outbreak in Brazil, the world’s second-leading cocoa producer at the time. Our results show that the disease negatively impacted the long-term education and earnings of exposed cohorts living in affected areas. Our findings suggest that an increase in child labor and family farm work, driven by changes in labor contracts and land use, could explain the results. In addition, we show evidence of the increase in land management contracts known as sharecroppers (meeiros, in Portuguese), which are frequently tied to child and modern slave labor in the affected regions.