Today, during “The Agro Unites” educational forum, Denys Marchuk, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Agri Council (UAC), and Oleksandr Koseniuk, UAC Board Member, expressed their vision of the importance of attracting young people to work in the agricultural sector and the necessary changes in education to achieve this goal.

According to Denys Marchuk, one of the main problems is the lack of desire among young people to connect their lives with the agricultural sector. “Human resources are critically important, and there is currently a lack of them,” he emphasized.

The UAC actively encourages young people to work in the agricultural sector. One of the successful examples is the powerful UAL educational center, which has grown with the support of the UAC. However, the lack of qualified personnel, such as agronomists, livestock farmers and operators of large machinery, remains an urgent problem for the industry.

"The mobilization affected rural areas from the very first days, which had a negative impact on the labor situation in the agricultural sector. Although there is a possibility to get a postponement from military service for workers, but the number of those ones cannot exceed 50%, and for some professions these quotas have already been exhausted. We need vocational school graduates. Attracting new staff to agricultural enterprises is a challenge, as agribusiness is becoming increasingly high-tech. It is impossible to put a person without experience behind the wheel of expensive agricultural machinery,” said Denys Marchuk.

The forum also emphasized the importance of agricultural education popularization. “For us, this is a matter of survival,” said the Deputy Chairman of the UAC and added that today's educational forum is aimed at developing new directions in this area. Denys Marchuk called for active work with young people to show them the prospects and opportunities of the agricultural sector, which can become a bridge between education and the labor market.