Agriculture continues to play a vital role in both Europe and Asia, though its share of employment is declining as economies diversify. A global statistical update published in 2025 estimates that about 916 million people worked in agriculture (including forestry and fishing) in the latest data point available in that release, representing 26.1% of total employment. Asia accounts for the largest share of agrifood-system employment, while Europe has a much smaller proportion; an Eurostat update released in early 2026 reports 8.4 million people employed in the European Union’s agricultural sector (including hunting and related service activities), with agriculture accounting for 3.9% of total EU employment in the latest year shown. This highlights the stark contrast between the two regions in terms of agricultural workforce size and the speed of structural transformation.

Europe’s agricultural industry is supported heavily by France, particularly through cereals and higher-value food and beverage supply chains, but Europe’s competitiveness is increasingly shaped by climate volatility, risk management, and regulatory compliance rather than labor intensity. EU-backed analysis published in 2025 estimates the EU agricultural sector loses more than €28 billion per year on average as a result of adverse weather, while only about 20–30% of climate-induced losses are insured through public, private, or mutual systems. This framing implies that resilience—insurance uptake, irrigation and water governance, heat/flood adaptation, and disease preparedness—will be as important to output stability as farm-gate productivity improvements.

China has expanded agricultural ventures and supply-chain positions across multiple regions, but many headline deal values and timelines in common circulation remain difficult to re-verify using only 2025+ primary documentation and therefore should be treated as partially unverified in this summary. What is verifiable in 2025–2026 sources is the continued strategic rationale: China-linked agribusiness groups are described by ratings and policy-monitoring institutions as having explicit mandates tied to food supply stability and agricultural modernization, which helps explain sustained investment in seeds, crop protection, and trading/logistics platforms. In addition, renewed market visibility around major protein processors has kept attention on earlier cross-border consolidation: 2025 Reuters coverage of the Smithfield Foods IPO reiterates a purchase price of US$4.7 billion for its acquisition by WH Group, underscoring the scale of capital deployed to secure downstream processing capacity and global market access.

Europe:

France remains the agricultural powerhouse of the European Union, producing cereals such as wheat and barley, along with dairy, wine, and livestock, while increasingly repositioning toward innovation-led competitiveness. Consolidated French export totals that are directly comparable across sources for the most recent calendar year are not uniformly available in 2025–2026 public releases; however, a 2025 government-partnered export guide compiled by Business France reports French agri-food exports of €82 billion in its latest consolidated year, while noting significant compositional shifts across markets and product categories. On the labor side, an OECD-distributed high-frequency series reports roughly 692,454 persons employed in “agriculture, forestry and fishing” in France in Q2 2025 (seasonally adjusted), consistent with continued labor contraction and mechanization/automation incentives.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) underpins this transformation with a total allocation of €386.6 billion, including €291.1 billion for direct payments and market measures and €95.5 billion for rural development, reflecting the EU’s continued reliance on income support alongside climate and rural competitiveness objectives. New eco-schemes reward farmers for sustainable practices, with 25% of direct payments linked to environmental measures in the CAP design. Regulatory requirements affecting forestry-linked supply chains are also tightening in practical terms: the EU’s deforestation-free product regime has been postponed to 30 December 2026 for operators (and 30 June 2027 for micro and small operators), but the policy direction remains toward traceability, geolocation-based due diligence, and simplified responsibility concentrated on first operators in the chain.

Europe faces significant challenges, including climate change, extreme weather events, and animal disease outbreaks, which threaten production growth and elevate the value of adaptation finance and nature-based measures. A practical implication for the next five years is that EU policy attention is likely to shift further toward closing the “protection gap” (insurance and risk pooling) and toward measurable outcomes in water efficiency, soil health, and farm-level emissions abatement, because losses are already material at the sector scale.

Asia:

Asia’s agricultural sector is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by urbanization, the adoption of technology, and growing sustainability concerns, with food security increasingly treated as a regional coordination problem rather than a purely national one. While rice and wheat remain staple crops, diversification into higher-value crops and livestock is accelerating, and the latest ILO-modelled employment shares accessible via major data portals in 2025 indicate agriculture still accounts for roughly the low‑20% range of jobs in China and the mid‑40% range in India (latest available estimates), underscoring continued dependence on rural labor in parts of Asia. The region is embracing digital tools, AI, and precision farming to boost productivity and climate resilience; ASEAN’s Food, Agriculture and Forestry Sectoral Plan 2026–2030 explicitly elevates productivity, resilient food systems, and sustainable forestry as regional priorities. Food security remains critical, and policy research in 2025 notes that ASEAN is projected to become one of the world’s largest trade blocs by 2030, implying that standards alignment, data interoperability, and reduced intra-regional friction in food trade will matter more for price stability and shock response.

Five-year outlook (as of 2026):

Across Europe and Asia, the most likely trend through the next five years is “productivity under constraint”: output and income stability will depend increasingly on technology diffusion, risk-management instruments, and compliance-grade traceability rather than on land expansion or labor growth. The OECD–FAO Agricultural Outlook released in 2025 projects global production growth over the coming decade to be mainly productivity-led, while real price pressure increases the premium on efficiency and value-added differentiation—dynamics that typically accelerate consolidation among farms and along supply chains. In Europe, delayed-but-firm deforestation-free requirements and CAP-linked environmental incentives are likely to strengthen demand for verified sustainability claims, pushing both European producers and Asian exporters toward traceability investments and “compliance-ready” sourcing corridors. In Asia, ASEAN’s 2026–2030 plan suggests deeper regional coordination on resilient food systems, which—if implemented—would likely expand digital extension services, improve logistics performance, and reduce post-harvest losses, with knock-on effects for trade competitiveness and rural incomes.