Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Universal Basic Income? Guaranteed Job?

The key to all this [the unintended consequences of industrial agriculture] is to recognize that the driving force behind industrial agriculture is not (as is usually claimed), the need to feed the world's population of 7 billion or more. Indeed, as a way of providing food, industrial agriculture is inefficient: the use of giant-scale standardisation on single crops is not a way to get the maximum yield from an acre of land, but to get the maximum yield per worker; the machinery and chemicals are intended to depopulate the agricultural landscape. Those workers that do remain are a quaint rearguard in retreat from the robots.