Agricultural labour and drug use. Insights from list experiments in Nigeria

Background: The world is facing a severe drug crisis, posing serious public health and societal risks. Yet, little is known about drug use among farmers and farmworkers, key contributors to global food production. Poor mental health and precarious working conditions in agriculture are common. Farmers and workers may turn to drugs to cope with these conditions, however, evidence on drug use in agriculture is extremely limited. A challenge in collecting such data is social desirability bias stemming from the topic’s sensitivity. We address this gap by using sensitive question techniques and offer novel evidence on drug use among farmers and farmworkers, highlighting links between working conditions, work-related health, and drug consumption. Methods: We conducted item-count and item-sum double list experiments with 1,554 farmers and workers to measure the prevalence and frequency of drug use in Nigeria’s labour-intensive tomato sector where the topic is highly relevant. List experiments avoid direct questioning and can estimate sensitive behaviours, while hiding respondents’ answers from the interviewer. Using these estimates, we ran multivariate regressions to identify work-related risk factors of drug use, focusing on burnout, work related pain and health problems, pesticide exposure, unusual working hours, and belief in work performance effects. Results: The item-count experiment suggests that about 8% of farmers, 20% of seasonal workers, and 6% of casual workers used drugs in the previous 12 months. The item-sum experiment finds that drug-using farmers and seasonal workers have consumed drugs on about 8 days in the last month on average (farmers possibly more than that), and drug-using casual workers on 7 days. Multivariate regressions show that work-related pain and belief in performance-enhancing effects are the most important risk factors for frequent drug use. Our results also demonstrate that burnout levels are significantly higher among farmworkers than among farmers, but we do not find a significant association between work-related burnout and drug use. Conclusions: Farmers and farmworkers suffer from important occupational health deficits. Drug use and mental health in rural areas in particular remain underappreciated on policy and research agendas. Implications for agricultural productivity and rural development should be further explored.