A report by the Salesian University Foundation, which analyzed and crossed data from the Public Employment System (SPE), the National Information System of Higher Education (Snies), the Labor Observatory for Education (OLE) and the National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane), among other sources such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, indicated that there are currently 630 vacancies for agro-industrial engineers, of which only 30% are being covered due to the lack of specialized human resources.
According to the analysis, at the moment there are about 300 students who, only in Bogotá, are being trained as agroindustrial engineers (Snies); The number of graduates in this career, between 2019 and 2020 in the capital of the country, did not exceed 60 professionals; and its Labor hook salary is between $ 2’100,000 and $ 2’300,000, not to mention that their labor linkage rate is 77%, which indicates that between 7 and 8 out of 10 agroindustrial engineers get a job in less than 6 months after they graduated (OLE).
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Similarly, according to information from the DANE, agriculture is the second activity that contributes in greater numbers to the occupation of labor in the country, represented in more than 3 million people who work in this sector.
Given this panorama, agro-industrial engineers have a historic opportunity and are emerging as one of the most relevant professionals with the best growth expectations.
It depends, for example, on their work to guarantee the supply of food to all the inhabitants of the country in the post-pandemic; Likewise, they are able to contribute one of the main debates of the moment, such as the reflection on food imports; And finally, they are fundamental to close the historical gap of needs that has not allowed the countryside to have the same level of development as cities.
“For these and other reasons, Argo industrial Engineering is called to lead the new developments of agriculture, supported by the possibilities that exist to potentiate the various productive and economic activities offered by the Colombian countryside”, says Camilo Navarro, dean of the Faculty of Engineering of the Salesian University Foundation.
The lifeline of academia to ensure food safety
Although the country has maintained an agricultural tradition for several centuries, the difficulty of competing with productions subsidized by other nations, added to recent developments and approaches in other areas of the national economy, has made Colombia an importer of its own food. This trend will have to be reconsidered in the years to come, with the decisive participation of agro-industrial engineers.
“The post-pandemic is going to have a significant effect on food production and processing. At this moment the country imports more than 10 million tons of grains annually and, with the mobility restrictions that were recently presented by the national strike, we will have to strengthen our raw materials and local production, “says Navarro.
The variety of climates, lands and biodiversity with which Colombia is also a factor that plays in favor of the purpose of revitalizing the countryside and its multiple possibilities, an objective towards which the National Government must necessarily look, considering the moment that the world is going through and the great lag that, in terms of economic and social growth, it presents the rural sector versus the urban sector.
In this sense, it is important to highlight some figures such as those cited by Jens Mesa, executive president of Fedepalma, in the prologue to the book “Agro and Agribusiness in Colombia”, according to which the nation has an agricultural frontier of more than 40 million hectares of which only 7.1 million (that is, 17.75%) are cultivated.
The goal, concludes the report of the Salesian University Foundation, is to train more agro-industrial engineers who can, not only overcome the gap that currently exists in this career and that could jeopardize the country’s food security in the short or medium term, but it is also necessary to train more professionals who are able to solve the paradox that indicates that the field, Despite being the greatest repository of future hopes in terms of food supply, today it continues to be impoverished due to the historical debt that several generations of Colombians maintain with the rural sector.