Ag and food processing sectors join forces on labour challenges

In Canada’s agriculture sector, 16,500 jobs went unfilled in 2017 due to a labour shortage and recent estimates indicate the problem has worsened.

In food and beverage manufacturing, 2020 surveys reveal approximately 30,000 positions were not filled.

The 2017 cost in lost sales and decreased yield due to delayed harvest was estimated at $2.9 billion, or 4.7 per cent of the Canadian agriculture sector’s annual total. 

Why it matters: A shortage of labour is being felt across the food and agricultural sectors, raising issues with productivity and economic health.

Kathleen Sullivan, chief executive officer of Food and Beverage Canada (FBC), says the manufacturing sector’s labour shortage could rise to 65,000 by 2025 based on current projections.

Partnering organizations in the newly formed National Workforce Strategy for Agriculture and Food and Beverage Manufacturing are hopeful the industry-led initiative will bring results.

“This project, I think, has the potential to have the most impact on this issue that we’ve seen in years,” Sullivan said in a recent Farmtario interview.

The national strategy was initiated through a grant from the Ryerson University-based Future Skills Centre thinktank to the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council (CAHRC) and was officially launched Oct. 12. 

However, work on the project has been underway since spring through a steering committee involving FBC and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. An advisory council includes representatives from about a dozen other stakeholders across the country.

“Our provincial governments have expressed interest in what we’re up to … and some will be sitting in as observers,” said Debra Hauer, manager of CAHRC’s Labour Market Information initiative. She emphasized that the planned two-year project is strictly industry-led.

Sullivan says she thinks stakeholders within the food and agriculture sector have so far failed to demonstrate they have similar priorities for labour, and this is reflected in “a fragmented approach that isn’t going to get us where we need to be.”

If they instead present a united front because of this strategy, it could send a message to all levels of government to take action, she added.

Government inaction so far has left her organization frustrated.

“I don’t understand this failure to recognize the concerns that are being raised – not just from this sector but also in other sectors – of this structural challenge of labour in Canada,” Sullivan says. It is a failure to recognize the consequences of doing nothing which, in the case of food production and food processing, stretch beyond economics into food security.

“What I have yet to see is somebody saying ‘we’re responsible for taking a look at the big picture.’ That’s one of the reasons this National Workforce Strategy is so important,” says Sullivan.

Focus areas identified in the CAHRC news release include the shortage of workers in general, the shortage of skilled tradespeople, the situation for foreign labourers and the potential for automation. These issues existed before the pandemic, but COVID-19 did make the public more aware and governments reacted with support programs and policy changes. 

A CAHRC survey last winter showed many agricultural business owners appreciated those supports. 

Governments’ longer-term COVID-19 responses, however, didn’t tend to benefit the agriculture and food processing sectors. Supports tended to focus on companies forced to shut down or lay off workers. 

“Our companies didn’t close and our workers did not lose their jobs,” Sullivan noted.

Pandemic-related government programs also tended to focus on businesses that lost revenue due to COVID. Agriculture and food processing companies didn’t generally lose revenue; instead, their costs increased, sometimes dramatically, in the form of installing barriers, reconfiguring production processes, providing personal protective equipment and meeting heightened requirements for bringing in and employing foreign workers.

“Before COVID, one of the big issues that people would talk about (in food and beverage manufacturing) was attraction of workers,” Sullivan says. “And what this really boiled down to was attracting them away from other sectors.”

That’s less likely to happen now because more sectors are scrambling to fill positions. 

“There is now a competition. Ultimately, if you’ve got a tight labour pool, there’s not enough to go around.”

Hauer says organizations don’t want to affect the efforts by other sectors to attract workers. Some of them are closely tied to food and agriculture. 

Research conducted by CAHRC earlier this year revealed two of the jobs with the most severe projected shortages are truckers and service technicians, both essential to many agricultural enterprises.

The National Workforce Strategy makes it clear that, for food and agriculture in Canada, labour shortages have been an issue for years and have worsened over time.

“We had been saying with our 10-year forecast that this was coming,” says Hauer. “For us, the pandemic did not reveal anything new about the challenges we’re facing.”

Both CAHRC and FBC will look to previous labour market assessments to inform the new strategy. For CAHRC, that’s a 2013 Workforce Action Plan for Agriculture and Agri-food, which called for a united voice within the food and agriculture sectors to tackle three pillars: having enough people to fill the positions, having people with the right skills to do the work and identifying future needs.

FBC released in April 2021 its National Workforce and Recovery Plan following two years of work to identify challenges and propose solutions. 

The first order of business is to create a list of labour challenges and identify what work, if any, is already being done to address them. Examples cited by Hauer and Sullivan include the Canadian Meat Council’s efforts to attract workers to meat processing jobs and AgScape’s work in Ontario schools to promote ag-related employment opportunities.

“We will not recreate the wheel” by duplicating work already being done, Hauer says, “but rather will make sure all the wheels are turning in the same direction.”