As labour-saving automation expands on farms, the workforce evolves. It not only becomes smaller, but also more skilled, capable of complementing new and increasingly complex technologies. A major issue faced by high-, middle- and low-income countries is where the farm workforce of tomorrow will come from and how to facilitate its transition from primarily low-skilled manual activities to work involving more complex and sophisticated technologies, including new digital technologies that are likely to increase the demand for skilled workers on farms and lead to higher farm wages.63
The fear that crop-picking robots will displace millions of farm workers without other job prospects is not well founded. In general, the automation of agricultural jobs and evolution of the farm workforce are gradual processes, and are not uniform across localities, crops and farm tasks. The incentives to adopt labour-saving methods are greatest for specific tasks that are labour-intensive and easy to automate at a low cost. Over time – but not at the same time – the supply of agricultural workers diminishes in different localities, closely linked to rising incomes, declining fertility, increasing education, and the rise in off-farm employment opportunities. Therefore, although the decline in the farm workforce is undeniable, it is happening unevenly across the globe.
Rather than rapidly dislodging large numbers of workers, automation is likely to continue incrementally. As the farm labour supply decreases, some tasks will be automated while others will continue to be labour-intensive. The benign view is that market signals will continue to guide the development and adoption of labour-saving techniques, and a process of incremental automation will release less skilled workers from newly automated tasks to other activities that are more difficult to automate. With some activities – for example, soil preparation and ploughing – automation will open up new tracts of land, thus increasing the demand for workers in other tasks (planting, weeding, thinning, harvesting) as food production expands.
That is not to say the process will be without friction; the adoption (or non-adoption) of labour-saving technologies will create unemployment (or labour shortages) at some times and in some places. Excessive automation may occur if there is a sudden breakthrough that gives farmers easy access to labour-saving technologies, providing an incentive to adopt them even while wages are low. This scenario is unlikely to play out in high-income countries, where rural labour shortages and rising wages are already the norm. In low- and middle-income countries, especially where rural labour is abundant and wages are low, excessive and too rapid automation could have a negative impact on commercial farm workers, particularly those with skill sets made obsolete by new technologies.3 Box 20 provides an example of the latter case from Brazil. In any case, automation can still improve the livelihoods of small-scale producers, as it enables family members to allocate more time to education and off-farm employment opportunities and enhances efficiency, productivity and resilience.
Another scenario is too little automation, especially if government policies create obstacles to automation on farms on the assumption this will preserve jobs in the agriculture sector. In the context of shrinking farm labour supply and rising wages, the assumption that limiting automation will preserve agricultural employment and incomes is likely to be flawed, for two reasons. First, restrictive automation policies make farms less competitive and unable to expand their production to satisfy growing domestic markets or exports. Second, key to improving wages and working conditions for farm workers is increasing their productivity, by coupling their labour to new technologies. Most of the world’s farm workers have family incomes below the poverty line, and the prospects of moving out of poverty remain dim without worker productivity-enhancing technologies. Limiting the adoption of labour-saving (and thus worker productivity-enhancing) technologies leads to persistently low farm worker wages.3
In light of this, expanding food production in an era of declining farm labour supply, while continuing to build educational systems to prepare the workforce of tomorrow, is a major policy challenge around the world. This challenge is not limited to primary production – it also applies to the other parts of agrifood systems, including processing and distribution. If workers are not available with the necessary skills to complement new technologies, it will be difficult to meet a growing global demand for food, especially in places where the farm workforce is growing slowly or even declining.
