China seeks to eliminate 250 million farmers

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China is looking at automating farming.

Over the next 7 years, China is working on a program where the farming in that country will become automated. The reason for this is to increase yields in an effort to help feed an ever growing population.

There is just one problem with this plan: it puts the 250 million Chinese farmers out of work.

The automation of farming is nothing new. It took place in many countries over the last few decades. As the number of people engaged in this practice fell, automation was required to compensate for the loss of labor. In the United States, the family farm is mostly gone. Instead, farming is done by large corporations which can utilize the economies of scale.

This is not the case in China. Most of the farming in that country is done on small farms. It is true this is extremely inefficient causing the overall production to be down. However, it is also what employs and provides livelihood to hundreds of millions of people.

Automated tractors, the use of big data, and environmentally friendly practices are largely absent in this country. This also makes sense since small farmers lack the resources to make such an investment.

The China government is not in such a position. It has the ability to invest in already proven technologies that are utilized around the world.

What is so concerning about this move is the loss of employment. Here he is a situation where the speed of change is going to create a lot of suffering. Many talk about retraining of people while others point to jobs created through other opportunities.

How are 250 million people going to be retrained in only 7 years? At the same time, how can an economy create jobs to serve 1/5 the population?

Both these situations seem highly unlikely to us.

This is a prime example of technological unemployment and how it works. The pace of change that we are going to see over the next decade was never seen before. Many in the most precarious positions are at the greatest risk. Billions of people in 3rd world areas are going to feel the impact of automation first.

A great deal of their gains were due to the outsourcing of labor by the richer countries. This will be reversed if technology makes it more affordable to manufacture products at home while eliminating the shipping costs. In the Western Countries, we are already seeing factories that are 75+% automated. As this shift continues, it will be these nations that suffer the most.

Which brings up the basic question for billions: What are they going to do to survive? Are we as a planet just going to let billions of people starve to death? Will we allow global poverty rates to reverse course and explode?

Without a direct basic income system like Manna, many are going to suffer. There are too many stories like this to conclude that there will be enough work for everybody. The situation with China is the largest in numbers but not the only one out there. There are millions of situations where the story is exactly the same: in the next 5-10 years, x number of people replaced by automation.

The time to make people aware of this is now. Approaching it like "this time is no differenet" will only put us further behind when things to hit full force.

Here is further reading on this subject.

https://www.thisisinsider.com/china-farming-jobs-risk-rise-automated-agriculture-2018-8

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