The Irish Business and Employers Confederation (Ibec) has forecasted estimates for the labour needs of the agriculture sector for 2024 and 2025.
The business and employer group today (Monday, April 15) published its Q1 economic outlook which is forecasting higher growth in exports, investment and the overall economy for this year and next year.
Featured in the outlook is an analysis of the labour force in Ireland, which Ibec said there were 95,000 jobs added in the past 12 months.
With the labour force growing at 3.5% annually, and numbers employed increasing by 3.4%, Ibec stated the additional labour supply is being absorbed almost as quickly as it can be added to the labour market.
Those employed in agriculture this year, according to Ibec, is a total of 112,000.
This is an increase of 4,000 from last year, 2023, which had 108,000 employed in agriculture.
However, Ibec has forecasted that the agriculture sector will not increase its employment needs for 2025, as it has estimated the labour force will remain at 112,000.
The majority of sectors are expanding headcount, with transport and storage recording the highest employment growth over the year, up 6%, as post-Covid shortages in the sector begin to ease.
This is followed by healthcare and public administration , up 4.5% and 3.8% respectively, marking growing needs for an expansion in public services to match population dynamics.
Ibec chief economist, Gerard Brady said: “Falling inflation and anticipated interest rate cuts this year should provide a boost to the Irish economy.
“For consumer facing businesses, the fall off in inflation to 2.3% in 2024, combined with high employment and rising wages will mean a return to real income growth for households, even though prices facing consumers will remain higher than previous years due to higher global commodity costs.
“Whilst the domestic market remains in a much better position than in much of Europe, there are broader concerns about the strength of the global economy which will weigh on Irish growth in the coming years.”
Following three years of double-digit growth in overall exports, 2023 saw a fall in total goods and services export volumes from Ireland of 4.8%.
This was partially driven by weakening sales of Covid related products in the BioPharma sector.
Outside of the BioPharma sector, goods exports fell by 3.3%. The largest indigenous dominated export sector of food and beverages experienced a fall in exports of 2%.
This general trend is consistent with weaker consumption across global economies as higher
interest rates hit consumer disposable income.
It is also consistent with globally weak sales cycles in some key multinational driven sectors and products.
Ibec is expecting exports to return to an upward path in 2024, with growth of 3.6% in the full year.
This will be driven by a marginally stronger performance in the global economy and an improvement in some sector and product specific sales which had cast a pall over overall exports in 2023.
It remains the case, however, that intensified global competition in some sectors and relatively weak growth in key trading partners, particularly in the Eurozone, will mean more subdued
export growth than had been the case for much of the past decade.