Agriculture continues to play a vital role in both Europe and Asia, though its share of employment is declining as economies diversify. The most recent global update released by the FAO estimates that in 2023, 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, a Eurostat update released in early 2026 reports that 8.4 million people were 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 the size of the agricultural workforce and the speed of structural transformation.

EU agricultural labor productivity rose by an estimated 9.2% in 2025, driven by an 8.1% rise in real factor income and a 1.0% reduction in agricultural labor volume, with productivity now running approximately 49% above its 2015 baseline. Gains were uneven: sharpest increases were in Luxembourg, Poland, and Estonia, while steepest declines were in Croatia, Portugal, and Greece.

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. An EU-backed analysis published in 2025 estimates that the EU agricultural sector loses more than €28 billion per year on average due to adverse weather, with losses projected to exceed €40 billion per year by 2050 under business-as-usual emissions scenarios. 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. This framing is further finding institutional traction: in February 2026, Portugal brought a proposal for a European Reinsurance Facility for Natural Catastrophes in Agriculture to the Agriculture and Fisheries Council, characterizing climate disasters as having transformed agricultural risk from a cyclical to a structural and systemic problem across the EU and hoping to address farmer insurance gaps.

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 - 2026 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 WH Group’s acquisition of Smithfield Foods, 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. According to consolidated trade data from Business France and FranceAgriMer, French annual exports of agricultural and agri-food products reach €81.9 billion to €83.2 billion, solidifying France as the European Union's top agricultural producer (accounting for 18% of total EU production value) and the world's leading exporter of wine by value (€16.5 billion). 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.

CAP remains the central policy instrument for this transformation. The current 2023–2027 framework carries a total allocation of €386.6 billion. Looking ahead, the European Commission published its CAP 2028–2034 proposal in November 2025, under which at least €293.7 billion would go directly to support farmers' incomes within the new National and Regional Partnership Fund framework, alongside a €6.3 billion Unity Safety Net for market crises. The EU Court of Auditors issued an opinion in early 2026 warning of risks posed by the new CAP's complex legal architecture, stressing that EU funding must remain traceable and that complicated planning arrangements could delay the delivery of funds and undermine the goal of simplification. Negotiations between the Commission, Parliament, and Council are continuing, with the European Council expected to address the MFF at its June 2026 summit.

On deforestation, the regulatory direction has firmed up considerably. Following a second postponement, the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will apply from 30 December 2026 for large and medium companies (and micro and small enterprises in the timber sector), and from 30 June 2027 for other micro and small enterprises. A May 2026 Commission simplification report refined due diligence obligations while maintaining the regulation's core objective of deforestation-free supply chains. The EUDR has also faced external pressure, with the USDA lobbying EU member states to introduce a "no risk" classification for some countries, including the US, though the Commission has confirmed it intends to enforce the regulation by the year-end deadline.

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 rapid transformation driven by urbanization, technology adoption, 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-modeled 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. Policy research published in 2025 notes that ASEAN is projected to become the world's fourth-largest trade bloc by 2030 and has developed a new Vision for Food, Agriculture and Forestry Towards 2045, along with a new FAF Sectoral Plan for 2026–2030 integrated with the ASEAN Community Vision 2045 and the AEC's future Blueprint. However, structural challenges are intensifying: the agriculture sector's growth rates are not keeping pace with population and national economic growth due to chronic underinvestment. In 2025, more than 400,000 hectares of rice land were affected by floods, and research published in 2026 argues that ASEAN's agricultural demographic transition and the increasing frequency of extreme weather shocks have created systemic vulnerabilities that current frameworks do not fully address. The share of people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity in the region rose from 14.7% in 2014 to 17.1% in 2023, a trend that persisted even as the ASEAN economy expanded.

Five-year outlook (as of 2026):

Across Europe and Asia, the most likely trend over the next five years is “productivity under constraint”: output and income stability will increasingly depend 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 that global production growth over the coming decade will be mainly productivity-led, while real price pressures increase 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.