A global skills shortage which is impeding economic development across most OECD countries is prompting different responses in various countries.
According to a recent World Economic Forum report, such is the disparity between skills needed and skills available that 85% of employers internationally are planning to prioritise skill upgrading over the next five years.
Australian employers evidently rely much more on migration than on education and training for upskilling workforce capability, especially in the professional services sector.
WEF’s “The Future of Jobs Report” revealed recently that 45% of Australian employers prefer the government tweaking the migration system to attract overseas talent instead of home grown skills development.
Irrespective of how effectively changes in government regulation smooth over underlying capacity problems in our national economy, it is clear we need a more creative and engaging approach to upskilling our working population.
Agriculture presents its own unique challenges beginning with the ageing farmer population.
Demographer and futurist Bernard Salt told a recent Queensland Farmers Federation gathering that in the decades ahead Australian agriculture would have to increase its output by at least another 25% just to keep its current market share.
A more ambitious and relevant vision in a world of growing population would be 40%, he argued, so long as the farm sector was up to realising the possibilities of an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
But with every rural Queensland community losing population and aging faster than everywhere else, one can reasonably ask: ‘Where are the younger Australians who are going to be the food and fibre industry of the future’?
In a recent report prepared by Deloitte, the Australian Food and Agriculture Taskforce has warned that “the nation’s food system is at a tipping point”, requiring “new investment and a coordinated approach that propels the sector’s evolution”.
Nowhere is this need more evident than in agriculture education and training, because apart from Marcus Oldam College in Victoria, our tertiary education sector is failing to attract young students in numbers sufficient to ensuring Australia’s food security and a vibrant export sector.
Universities Australia data, for example, shows that of the more than 95,000 students who commenced studies in 2024 at Queensland universities, just 1163 enrolled in agriculture and environmental studies – and a third of them were international students.
Seven of the seventeen Australian universities offering degrees in agriculture or closely related fields are ranked in the world’s top 100 for agriculture, but with just 500 graduates annually from all these institutions entering the workforce, the jobs available far outnumber them.
Farming is already a complex and demanding technology-rich skills system where data and spatial sciences, natural systems and climate science, bioinformatics, genetics, precision engineering, and agribusiness management make for success or failure.
Clearly, not enough is being done strategically to address the growing knowledge need in agriculture by effectively engaging young urban Australians.
Calls for closer collaboration between our rural industries and the tertiary education sector date back nearly two decades but without result.
If we are to avoid a further downward spiral of declining enrolments and critical mass in agricultural education and training, something different will have to be done in what the Food and Agriculture Taskforce calls “coordination across the value chain.”
This means an urgent national effort getting more young people, especially from the cities, into agriculture education and the workforce opportunities that follow.
- An earlier and shorter version of this article appeared in the Queensland Country Life, Thursday 19 December 2024, page 19 as “Future farming needs young urban Aussies”.
Professor John Cole 