Perhaps agriculture is the only profession, which is providing employment to the largest section in the developing world and despite major investment and expansion of other employment generating sectors like manufacturing in China, no major shifting has occurred from agriculture. Similarly despite rapid growth in service sector, shifting from agriculture to service in India is almost negligible. It means, there are hardly any other sectors, which can imbibe such a large section of human population. European wih very less population can afford to shift from agriculture to manufacturing,RD and other sectors but for countries like India, China, BDesh and Pakistan, it will be a Herculean task

Ranbir I have a slightly differing opinion I think lots of smaller farmers have already become labor's is cities and town. In Indian subcontinent the land holding in most places are so small that it is not feasible to support a family on farm revenues. In west UP most of the villages have less that 0.5 ha per household, can a family survive on this.

India need to start big organized agriculture companies, individual owned or cooperative but mechanized agriculture n large scale can provide some respite, else number of farmers will go on reducing

Thank you for your answers.

Ranbir, I am told by economists that when one source of employment disappears in a free market economy that other means of earning a crust open up. I witnessed this happening in the UK under Margaret Thatcher and in the subsequent years, but am yet to be convinced that this really happens. I see people working longer for less real pay and western economies still teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, five years after the banking crash. The technology that I contemplate would make growing many crops by traditional methods completely uncompetitive in free market situations. Saif suggests that I would be doing subsistence farmers a favour, however there are plenty of historical instances where changes in technology have led to starvation, since alternative employment does not arise overnight.

Saif, I am not yet confident enough to quote a biofuel price that would arise from this technology, but in a world that is moving away from using fossil fuels, it might have a competitive advantage. This should result in the end of the oil, coal and natural gas industries with resultant effects on the economies of OPEC countries. The economies of the Middle East would collapse and since they have derivative investments globally, this would have global knock on effects, sending the planet into economic meltdown until a new equilibrium establishes. Kuwait City will become a ghost town in the same way as post goldrush towns were abandoned.

The inventor in me would love to open Pandora's box, but the humanitarian, says that this has to be done very slowly. This is ethics not science.

Dear Graeme: Probably I could not put my answer in proper words. What actually I meant that shifting from agriculture to industry in Europe, USA, Japan etc become feasible largely because there was large market in India and China for their products and export earning provided them a strong boosting for further investment. Does there exist any strong market for India and China so that they can shift large section of the population from agriculture to industry. Probably, yes as whole world is economically connected but it will require more efficient production and competitive price, which will make again the return not enough to sustain very large section in these sectors. Recent data for employment generation from service, manufacturing and agriculture in India would further clarify the whole issue. I am not an economist but I believe for large country like India, strong internal consumption, large investment in rural based small scale industries with part time employment in different sectors can be more sustainable. Production of cheaper biofuel will shift the economic advantage from oil rich countries to countries like USA, Australia, Canada with enough of surplus land.

Thank You Rajbir. I must visit India sometime, since without first hand knowledge, only prejudice exists in the mind. I remember Prof Tom Stonier predicting in the 1970s that mechanisation was so advanced in the West, that we needed to begin to prepare for a leisure society. He suggested that we needed to move away from the mindset that we had developed during the industrial revolution and prepare for a life where we only work three or four hours per week. Since then globalisation has kicked in big style opening up the Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, South American... markets to global trading. This has allowed the continued growth of economies, dependent on ever increasing consumption, to continue to grow. There must however come a point when virtually all humans are tied up in this global market and basically have everything that they want. Satiation is not an unimaginable future. What then?

You and Saif have made me think about possibilities. The technology that I am talking about could be done on a very large scale, or it could be done by many people on a small scale. 0.5ha is not a large acreage, but with efficient technology, it is capable of producing more than is currently produced by 5ha of intensively farmed land. Unfortunately, I don't see how this could happen, since big business would monopolise the technology, using its investment clout to marginalise small producers.

Perhaps India will move from an agrarian society to a post agricultural, post industrial, post modernist society in one jump. What do people do in a leisure society?