Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 5/26/20

A top U.N. food and ag expert predicts that coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses around the world will accelerate the adoption of meatpacking robots and other automation, POLITICO Europe’s Arthur Nelsen reports.

“Human labor will be increasingly replaced by machines,” said Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s trade and markets division. That will represent what he called “a fundamental change” from the conditions that have turned slaughterhouses into hotbeds of contagion, like the lack of protective equipment and crammed workspaces.

In Europe, Schmidhuber said the meatpacking sector’s “dependency on skilled labor will lead to automatization in pig and cattle slaughter operations similar to what we have seen in the poultry meat packaging industry,” which he described as “completely automated.”