Will industrial evolution threaten future of cars – as well as cows?

World of Politics with Harry McGee

It’s a tough old job being a cow. I’m going to hold that thought and come back to it eventually, after a convoluted meander through a few other issues. This column is mainly about obsolescence but it’s also about climate change. It’s about how things disappear, including trades and industries and jobs.

About four years ago, I went on a trip to Zimbabwe to see how it was faring in the post-Mugabe era – Robert Mugabe had been forced to stand down from office several years earlier.

It came as no surprise to see the extent of Chinese investment there. Of course, if you follow geopolitics you will know that China has invested trillions into Africa, building roads all over the continent, taking over land, banks, mines and ports.

It’s not an altruistic investment. It gets direct access to Africa’s precious mineral resources, gets paid for building roads and infrastructure, and has a nascent market for its products.

In a small rural outpost, we came across a two-wheeled tractor built by the Chinese. It was essentially like a mechanised rotovator. The farmer pushed it like a motorised lawnmower. It turned the earth and when you put on a different attachment it sowed seeds without disturbing the crust of the earth too much (in arid countries, if you root up the earth too much it dries out and loses nutrients).

The tractor was shared between several families in a hilly region where marginal farming was undertaken. Essentially the tractor could do in a day what four oxen could do in a week.

Thus this new machine would replace the oxen and they would eventually experience the same demise as the plough-horse in Ireland, once tractor technology became affordable in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Since the industrial age, new technology has tended to replace humans or animals with machines. It also accelerated the process where people were separated from land, as cities expanded to accommodate the new factories which were mass manufacturing for new and expanded markets.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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