Reimagining agriculture for young people

Is the agriculture sector fated to die out? Globally, the average age of farmers has been steadily creeping up, approaching 60 in developed countries.

- Maximo Torero

This leaves the sector, which supplies roughly one-quarter of jobs worldwide, in a bind: Unless it attracts large numbers of young workers, it could decline precipitously.

Promisingly, 16% of the world’s population — 1.2 billion people — are aged 15-24, and many in this cohort are struggling to find jobs, especially in the developing world. For example, in Africa, people under 25 comprise about 60% of the population, while around one-third of Africans aged 15-35 are unemployed.

But young people in the developing world continue to flee rural areas in search of higher-paying, higher-status work in cities and foreign countries. This migration pattern has contributed to a decades-long global decline in the number of young people working in agriculture and living in rural areas.

In Kenya, youth agricultural employment fell dramatically in recent decades, from 58.9% in 1990 to 28.5% in 2020. Meanwhile, Europe's rural youth population (ages 15-24) shrank by 1.7 million between 2013 and 2019, and only 12% of the continent's farms are managed by people under 40 in 2025. In Southeast Asia, rural youth comprised only around 7% of the total population in 2020, down from about 16% in 1950, while just 11% of Japan’s farmers are under 50. And in Latin America, 1.2 million young people are expected to leave agriculture by 2030.