One of the main challenges faced by agricultural automation is the risk of leaving behind marginalized groups – such as women, small-scale producers and youth – given the scale bias of automation towards larger farms. The high costs of many existing automation technologies and their associated skill requirements can lead to widening inequalities and deepening of digital divides. Automation may be linked with increased unemployment and job displacement for unskilled labourers; not only can this have negative implications for inclusiveness, but it can distort perceptions about its benefits. Policies can play a central role in mitigating or avoiding any of the above negative impacts and ensuring that automation contributes to inclusive agricultural transformation.
Addressing the technological divide through technical and institutional innovations
More recent technologies, including those associated with the digital revolution, can make automation come close to scale neutrality and thus be more accessible to all. The deployment of small machinery has enabled small-scale producers to automate many agricultural operations (see Chapter 3). Institutional mechanisms, such as shared service provision and cooperative ownership facilitated by digital technologies, have supported the adoption of automation technologies.41 It is farmers who should choose which automation solutions best fit their local agroecological conditions, while governments should create a level playing field. The latter can support the emergence of service markets by improving rural infrastructure, providing good legal conditions, facilitating border crossings, and developing service providers’ knowledge and skills, including business training. Third-sector organizations, such as producer associations and cooperatives, can help reduce the transaction costs of working with small-scale producers, for example, by organizing farmers in groups.42 Digital tools can address some of the challenges associated with service markets and reduce transaction costs. Governments can facilitate the use of such tools by building digital connectivity, literacy and trust.43
Ensuring that women benefit from automation
The impacts of automation on women can be both positive and negative; taking account of their needs is key for avoiding negative effects.26 Women often have less access to automation technologies – partly because their plots are smaller and more fragmented and they have less access to markets, credit and extension (see Chapter 4). Policies, legislation and investments that address these disadvantages (e.g. through improving women’s land rights and access to credit and extension) can help increase their access to automation. It is important to adopt human rights-based monitoring approaches, collecting disaggregated data to measure impacts on women’s livelihoods, rights and opportunities. National legal frameworks should also provide for gender-sensitive regulatory impact assessments, and develop and budget for measures aimed at avoiding and mitigating any diverse impact on women. Legal frameworks must recognize the gender-specific challenges that women face and take measures to address them. These may include allocation of financial resources to expand access to entrepreneurship through credit, provision of training (including in digital literacy), and measures designed to improve their access to input and output markets.
Women’s poor access to mechanization also depends on social norms. Potential entry points to change this include gender awareness campaigns (e.g. showcasing women who are successful service providers or operators) and support to female-based mechanization cooperatives or associations, in which women collectively manage machinery, and can gain access to knowledge and skills development and finance. More research is needed to better understand how to improve women’s access to mechanization. Automation usually involves heavy upfront costs; as female-owned businesses tend to be smaller with less capacity to invest, this has important implications for women’s competitiveness.
Women may also be less able to express their needs due to lack of empowerment.44 Policies, legislation and investments that use human rights-based monitoring approaches and enhance women’s power can help them to better express their needs. Public research and development can focus on gender-friendly mechanization technologies, tailoring their design to the needs of women.
Focusing on rural youth to ensure a smooth and inclusive transition in the digital era
One of the main challenges for agricultural development is the outmigration from rural areas of youth – especially those with higher education levels – leaving behind an increasingly ageing population and serious challenges in terms of the sustainability of agriculture and agrifood systems. Agricultural automation can play a key role in reversing this trend. It can fill labour gaps; digital technologies can spur the interest of rural youth to find jobs in the agrifood sector, including at the farm level, creating new employment opportunities with better working conditions and incomes.45
As mentioned in previous chapters, young farmers are often the first to adopt and operate automation technologies – in part due to their better access to information and digital technologies, such as smartphones – and are thus instrumental in digital automation in agriculture.25 They combine insights and expertise in agricultural practices with the digital skills necessary for new technologies.46 A specific agricultural automation agenda that targets rural youth and ensures they acquire the necessary skills to perform new highly skilled jobs should become a policy priority. Such an agenda should aim to build their competences not only for agricultural production but also for performing high-tech operations along agrifood value chains. This should be complemented by financial and policy support, as well as research, development and technical assistance to ensure a holistic approach to the transformation of agrifood systems. Public education can play a vital role in a smooth transition and equitable access to new employment opportunities.47 This is particularly important as young rural people are likely to continue exiting agriculture, especially in low- and middle-income countries, but can then transition to higher-skilled jobs at other stages of agrifood systems.
Community-led rural development initiatives should include youth in consultation, planning and decision-making. Legal frameworks can support these initiatives by creating an enabling environment for local development, establishing mandatory quotas for youth participation and creating youth organizations.
Improving agricultural extension and rural advisory services
Publicly funded extension services have always played an important role in ensuring inclusive agricultural automation. Apart from the various challenges which small-scale producers face, limited access to reliable and timely advisory services is a major constraint to increasing their productivity. Across the world, publicly funded extension services are a fundamental part of transforming agriculture, as they represent a major source of information. In many countries, extension continues to use different approaches. Given the lack of well-trained extension personnel – a major constraint in most low- and middle-income countries – e-extension is a valid complement to traditional extension, using digital models for knowledge generation and dissemination. When scaled, this can lead to a new generation of extension services that also support tailored automation solutions.48, 49
There is an urgent need to collect and transform neglected knowledge and make it available to producers through novel delivery systems; such systems can adapt scientific results, tailoring advice to suit producers with different contexts and profiles. Lessons from two technical studies developed for this report point to the potential of digital tools to revolutionize extension and advisory services; innovative delivery methods can substantially increase access to services and build skills for sustainable automation use.25, 33 In a number of cases (e.g. Igara Tea in Uganda; SOWIT in Ethiopia, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia; and Tun Yat in Myanmar), service providers also offer extension service provision. Some assist agricultural producers to use the service and operate machinery as part of the solution. Digital technologies – for example, IoT, audio- and video-recordings and calls on cell phones, GIS, simulation modelling, and remote sensing – can open up whole new landscapes for effective knowledge delivery. These technologies must be harnessed and exploited to fill existing information gaps and provide the effective guidance that farmers need. This also suggests that, in addition to publicly funded extension services, public–private partnerships have an important role to play in improving farmers’ access to field support. Finally, digital tools can also facilitate agricultural advisory services channelled through contract farming operations or supply chain contracts.
Safeguarding against negative effects on employment
Automation can have a wide range of effects on rural employment, both positive and negative (see Chapter 4). Where it emerges as a response to market forces (e.g. rising rural wages due to structural transformation) or replaces unpaid family labour, it most likely will not cause unemployment but will help fill labour gaps. On the other hand, if automation is artificially promoted by large-scale public efforts (e.g. subsidies on machinery imports) – before the emergence of a demand for automation – the result could be unemployment, job displacement and falling or stagnant rural wages. Policymakers should be careful not to promote automation before it is needed; however, nor must they inhibit adoption under the assumption that it will displace labour and create unemployment.
Policy support that provides public or collective goods through GSS – contributing to an enabling environment for the agrifood sector and beyond – is the most likely to deliver a smooth transition to greater automation without creating unemployment. This includes supporting agricultural research and development and knowledge transfer services (e.g. training and technical assistance), as well as infrastructure development and maintenance (e.g. improving rural roads, irrigation systems, storage infrastructure and internet connectivity). Massive advances in research and development, mostly in the private sector, continue to place new farm automation solutions within the reach of farmers at a decreasing cost. This is good news for the need to raise food production as farm workforces around the world contract.
Building digital skills for inclusiveness
Farmers and agriculture professionals must acquire skills to manage the new systems with agricultural automation and also to access new, higher-skilled jobs in agrifood systems; this needs to be the focus of governments. Skill acquisition is especially relevant to young people who are a transformative power.25 In some contexts, targeting children at school can be helpful as they can function as a technological bridge for their parents,41 and schools that already equip farmers with agronomic and zootechnical knowledge can expand to include digital literacy. Access to information is crucial to producers’ ability to keep pace in an increasingly competitive world. Moreover, information should always be a public good; its provision is the responsibility of government. With the right skills and access to information, those who lose their jobs to automation will be equipped to either accompany the new technology on-farm or find alternative work downstream or upstream in the agrifood supply chain. At the same time, part-time agricultural producers can also acquire better skills to find off-farm employment and improve and diversify their incomes.
