Labour markets in action - Who wants to be a coconut millionaire?

Picking coconuts is an arduous job – tough on the joints climbing high into the trees and a fall could be fatal.

However, according to this article this particular profession may be about to made obsolete when the Indian state of Kerala announced a competition “to devise a machine that could ascend a coconut tree and harvest the nuts, thereby doing away with the need for human climbers.”

The thing is, lots of jobs depend on this profession. “The economy of Kerala is very agrarian and many people depend on agriculture and the coconut. It’s one of the most important products we have, and every part of the tree is used”. As we learn in GCSE economics, changes in price and productivity of capital may replace labour with more capital intensive production methods therefore demand for labour falls. Students could illustrate this with a demand and supply of labour diagram for coconut harvesting in Kerala!