"Not Because They Have No Other Choice": Cherrie Atilano on Youth and the Future of Agriculture at ADB's Youth Symposium

AGREA's Cherrie Atilano joined ADB and Plan International's 6th Asia and the Pacific Youth Symposium to argue that young people should choose agriculture because they see a future in it.

The sentence that reframes the problem

"Young people should choose agriculture not because they have no other choice, but because they see a future in it."

Ms. Cherrie Atilano, Founding Farmer of AGREA, offered that formulation at the 6th Asia and the Pacific Youth Symposium, convened by the Asian Development Bank and Plan International at ADB Headquarters in Manila on 21–22 September 2026.

It is a short sentence, and it does something that most policy language about youth in agriculture does not. It reframes the problem. The standard framing is a recruitment problem: young people are leaving the farm, and we need to attract them back. The framing Atilano offered is a design problem: what would agriculture have to look like for a young person to choose it deliberately?

Those are different questions, and they lead to different answers. A recruitment campaign produces posters. A design problem produces questions about income, land access, technology, market power, and whether the work is compatible with the life a young person wants to build.

What the symposium is

APYS6 is the sixth edition of a forum co-convened by ADB and Plan International. Its 2026 theme was "Solving Complex Challenges through Meaningful Youth Engagement," and its scope was deliberately broad: the role of young people in agriculture and food security, water and urban development, and environmental conservation.

ADB's stated rationale is demographic. Over 60 percent of the world's youth population lives in Asia and the Pacific, and the bank frames young people as having "a vital role to play in shaping the region's most pressing issues, from policy and economic growth to social inclusion and climate change."

The symposium's objectives were specific: to demonstrate and consolidate young people's contributions to innovative solutions, to strengthen their capacity to engage with emerging challenges and connect with development professionals, and to provide networking that bridges generations, sectors, and countries. It was held in hybrid format with no participation fee, and it explicitly committed to including youth from marginalised and underrepresented communities.

This is not a ceremonial youth event appended to a larger conference. It ran as its own two-day programme, with the agriculture, food security, nature, and rural development session held on the second morning.

The session, and who was in it

The agriculture session ran from 9:00 to 10:15 on 22 September, moderated by Tomoko Kato, Senior Food and Nutrition Specialist in ADB's Agriculture, Food, Nature, and Rural Development Sector Office. Its stated objective was for young people to explore the future of food and agriculture and the role of young people as food systems change agents.

Atilano appeared alongside two co-panelists: Eduardo Cleofe, a farmer and the owner of Luntiang Republika Eco-Farm in Alfonso, Cavite, and Mehedi Hasan Bappy, Project Coordinator for the Youth and Adolescent Nutrition Program in Bangladesh at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.

The composition is worth noting. A farmer running a working eco-farm, a nutrition specialist working on adolescent health in Bangladesh, and a social entrepreneur running an island-based agricultural system in the Philippines are three different entry points into the same question. Cleofe's perspective is operational — what it takes to run a farm. Bappy's is nutritional — what young people need to be healthy. Atilano's is systemic — how an agricultural economy is organised, and who gets to build it.

Later the same morning, the symposium ran a Youth Innovators segment in a TED-talk format, with short presentations from a farmer-content creator, an integrated farm founder, a team behind a waste-tracking application, a rainwater harvesting project, and a youth facilitator working on an environmental programme. That sequencing mattered: the panel discussed the sector, and then young practitioners showed what they were already doing in it.

The problem the sentence is answering

The reason a sentence about choice lands with force is that the choice is currently not being made.

The average age of a Filipino farmer is a moving figure depending on the source and the year. The Department of Agriculture said in May 2025 that the average was "nearing 60" and that the need to involve the younger generation was "growing more urgent." Reporting in November 2025 put the figure at 56, quoting a legislator who warned that "the Philippine agriculture sector is on the edge of collapse" and that "there is no sufficient influx of young people to take their place." Senate sources have cited an average of about 53, with projections of a potential "critical shortage of farmers" within the next decade. AGREA's own institutional profile cites 57.

The variation is a measurement problem, not a disagreement about direction. Every figure points the same way: the people who grow the country's food are, on average, approaching or past retirement age, and not enough younger people are replacing them.

The employment data complicates the picture in a way that is easy to miss. Agriculture still accounts for a substantial share of total employment — 21.5 percent in October 2025 and 20.0 percent in November 2025, per the Philippine Statistics Authority. Young people are not absent from the labour force; youth labour force participation was 29.5 percent in July 2025. But Senate analysis notes that few are entering the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors.

So the problem is not that young people are not working. It is that agriculture has not become a sector they choose.

Why "no other choice" is the operative phrase

The phrase "not because they have no other choice" identifies something specific about how agricultural work is perceived and structured.

Where agriculture is the only available livelihood, people enter it by default. That has consequences. It means the sector absorbs people who did not want to be there, which shapes how the work is done, how it is valued, and whether anyone invests in improving it. It also means the sector's reputation is built on visible hardship rather than visible possibility — and reputation is what shapes a young person's expectations.

AGREA's own account of its founding describes exactly this dynamic in Marinduque. Farmers relied on practices that produced low yields and environmental damage; traders bought crops at very low prices; and in turn, the island's youth avoided pursuing agriculture as a career. The organisation's response was to work on the conditions rather than the messaging — to treat farmers as entrepreneurs, to help them plan and price and negotiate, and to make farming, in AGREA's own formulation, "cool, smart, sexy, and humane — especially to the youth."

That is the substance behind Atilano's sentence. The argument is not that agriculture needs better advertising. It is that agriculture needs to become a sector where a young person can see a viable trajectory: a livelihood that generates income, a business that can grow, a set of skills that commands respect, and a role in decisions that affect the land and the community.

The brief describes Atilano's message as framing agriculture as entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, climate action, and purpose — and adding that purpose becomes powerful when it is put into action. That list is not aspirational decoration. Each item corresponds to something a young person considering the sector would actually need: ownership, tools, a market, a reason.

What AGREA's own numbers say

The strongest argument AGREA can make about youth in agriculture is its own graduate data.

According to the organisation's profile as a focal point for the ASEAN NGO/CSO community, 58.21 percent of Farm School graduates are youth, meaning those aged 18 to 25. That is a majority. The same profile records that 134 graduates had been produced at the time of writing, with 99.25 percent assessed as competent.

The Farm School, based in Barangay Cawit, Boac, Marinduque, is one of the first of its kind in the Philippines. It delivers TESDA-accredited qualifications including Organic Agriculture Production NC II, and its curriculum begins — by design — with dream-building, leadership, values formation, and financial literacy before any technical instruction. That sequencing was introduced partly because fewer than twenty percent of its first cohort of 25 students were women, and it reflects a broader premise: that a trainee who has articulated why they are there is more likely to finish.

The organisation also runs youth leadership initiatives among the twelve activity areas it implements annually, and its Foundation is described as working to advance "youth leadership in agriculture" across the Philippines and ASEAN. Atilano's own history is part of the same argument: she began teaching fellow farmers at twelve, growing up in sugarcane farming communities.

None of this proves that the Farm School model can be scaled to a national labour shortage. A school producing dozens of graduates per cohort is not a solution to a sector employing millions. But it is evidence for a narrower and more useful claim: that when agricultural training is designed around entrepreneurship, dignity, and a visible future, young people do enrol, do complete, and do pass assessment.

The relationship this appearance sits inside

Atilano's panel appearance was not an isolated invitation. It sits within a working relationship between AGREA and ADB on youth and food systems.

In March 2026, AGREA co-organised two sessions at the Asia and the Pacific Food Systems Transformation Forum hosted by ADB: "ASEAN Youth Initiatives for Sustainable Food Systems: Advancing Healthy Diets and Climate Action," which Atilano moderated alongside ADB natural resources and agriculture economist Yating Ru, and a reception dinner and chefs' showcase celebrating local ingredients, seasonal cooking, and farmers' stories.

ADB also launched an inaugural Youth Awards under the banner "Shaping a Healthier Food Future," with winners recognised at that Forum across individual leadership, community leadership, and digital innovation categories. AGREA publicised the call for nominations. The Filipino winner in the individual leadership category, Rhodman Joseph Ubas, later appeared at APYS6 as one of the youth innovators.

That continuity matters for how the symposium should be read. A single panel appearance is a moment. A pattern of co-organised sessions, award programmes, and repeat participation is an institutional relationship — and relationships are what turn a panel discussion into a pipeline.

What the symposium did and does not establish

A two-day symposium is an input. It does not establish that any young person in the room will enter agriculture, that ADB will change its lending priorities, or that Plan International's programming will shift.

The agenda lists no commitments, no funding announcements, and no signed agreements. What it lists is a structure: a panel with a stated objective, a set of youth innovator presentations, a brainstorming session where participants formed groups to build agenda items for the agriculture and water sectors, and a roundtable where selected nominated youth joined discussions with ADB department heads.

That last element is the one to watch. A symposium that ends with young people presenting to adults is a showcase. A symposium that ends with young people in a roundtable with the Deputy Director General for Agriculture, Food, Nature and Rural Development is a channel. Whether the channel carries anything depends on what ADB does with what it hears — and on whether the youth who sat at that table are invited back.

Similarly, the sentence Atilano offered does not, by itself, change anything. It names a standard. A sector that wants young people to choose it has to be worth choosing — and that is a question about prices, land, credit, infrastructure, and voice, not about messaging.

What comes next

For AGREA, the next step is the ordinary work that follows a speaking engagement: bringing the conversation back into the Farm School's recruitment, into the design of youth-facing programmes, and into the organisation's partnerships.

For ADB and Plan International, the next step is to carry the agriculture agenda from the brainstorming session into the follow-up engagements the symposium was designed to feed — including the ADB Annual Meeting in Aichi-Nagoya in 2027, which the event's objectives explicitly named as a destination for youth insights.

For the young people in the room, the next step is less abstract. Some of them will go back to farms, some to companies, some to civil society organisations, and some to ministries. The question Atilano's sentence poses is whether they will describe agriculture as the thing they fell into or the thing they chose.

We are grateful to ADB and Plan International for convening the symposium and for including AGREA in it. The value of a platform like this is not the stage. It is the room — and who is in it when the agenda is set.

To learn more about AGREA Foundation's work on youth leadership and agricultural education, explore our official channels. Organisations interested in collaborating on youth in agriculture or food systems programming can reach out through our contact page.