The Agri-Food Pact for Skills partnership: A unique opportunity for collaboration

The Agri-food Pact for Skills partnership is an EU led initiative that aims to bring together all actors in the agri-food sector to ensure the best set of skills through the highest quality education, vocational training and life-long learning activities. To achieve this, the partnership has specific objectives, a roadmap, and key performance indicators, all in the context of a sustainable ecosystem that requires a higher attractiveness to the young but also the drive to improve the skills of the current workforce.

The agri-food sector is the largest European industry in terms of workforce. There are more than 11 million farms and 22,000 agri-food cooperatives in the EU that create jobs for 22 million people, largely in rural areas. Furthermore, 289,000 food processing companies provide jobs for a further 4.5 million people to produce high-quality food and drink products. It is worth noting that 99% of those businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The sector is facing challenges that generate instability in the sector, with trade-offs which sometimes generates unexpected consequences. Some of those are the globalisation of trade, the impact of climate change, the increase of urbanisation, the changing consumer demands, the generational renewal and the intense competition from third countries. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have accelerated these challenges and even created new ones. All those are disrupting the dynamism and resilience of the agri-food sector, which is a central part of European culture and tradition and is vital for the development of Europe.

The EU agri-food sector is trying to tackle many of those challenges through partnerships across the food ecosystem, with workers organisations and authorities. One of those initiatives is the Agri-Food Pact for Skills, which is also part of the EU Code of Conduct, a broader initiative trying to overcome the challenges in the sector.

The Agri-Food Pact for Skills partnership is led by the European Commission, specifically DG GROW, DG EMPL and DG AGRI, with the coordination of two umbrella organisations: Copa-Cogeca representing the agriculture sector, and FoodDrinkEurope representing the food industry.

The Pact involves universities, training centres, and large EU projects in education and training. These include Erasmus+ projects such as FIELDS, EQVEGAN and I-RESTART (which launches in September). EIT-Food and the ISEKI Food association, as well as training projects for the tool supply sector CEMA are also members.

Critically, workers associations are also represented by the sectorial trade union platform EFFAT, providing the social dialogue into the Pact.

• The Agri-Food Pact for Skills Partnership will engage in activities to skill up the food chain by:
• Developing actions for up- and reskilling in the ecosystem;
• Developing partnerships between education and training organisations, business operators, and business support organisations, to overcome the skills gap;
• Continuing the efforts of social partners developing new partnerships, bodies, dialogue, agreements, or targeted actions with social partners;
• Mobilising students and trainees across the EU for better training;
• Highlighting the relevance of vocational education and training (VET), including apprenticeships, as well as of life-long learning across the EU;
• Ensuring better communication around the attractiveness of the agri-food ecosystem in order to attract young generations and experts to fulfil new job roles linked to the challenges faced by the ecosystem;
• Taking special care of the needs of SME skill needs;
• Aligning and communicating amongst the employers, employer associations, workers and trade unions (social dialogue) and the education and training organisations.

The Agri-Food Pact for Skills was launched on 18 February 2022 and is still in its initial stages, establishing a governance model and a roadmap to start implementing actions.

Interested parties are encouraged to contact the FoodDrinkEurope secretariat to explore opportunities to support the partnership and get involved.