The Vatican would be in serious trouble, but I think the winners would be Russia and the Americas. Plenty of land, plenty of mineral resources, and plenty of water.
I think Britain would be screwed in the short term, given its high population.
Australia may have a vehicle manufacturing industry, but how about locomotives? Aircraft? Earth movers? Caterpillars? Industrial electronics? Machine tooling, factory robots, road-building equipment, computers, etc ad nauseum?
Our industrial infrastructure is built on an extremely long chain of dependencies. There is a huge and complex ecosystem required to build, fuel, and maintain the equipment required to maintain our standard of living.
And yeah, technology is essential to farming. Before modern farming practices, a huge percentage of the people were involved in growing, harvesting, and delivering food products to themselves and others. Remove the trappings of modern high-tech farming, and you’ll have to move the majority of your population out into agriculture just to keep them alive. That will leave even fewer people to continue to build a high-tech infrastructure. I think you could wind up in a downwards spiral until GDP and living standards are a small fraction of what they are today. Possibly after starvation killed off the unsupportable population.
A few points:
France has huge Uranium mines in Brittany - it seems that granite and Uranium come together - which means that the UK has potential mines in Cornwall.
I was interested to see that only 15% of China is agriculturally viable, but that is not significant since few people live in deserts. My understanding is that China’s agricultural sector has long been, and still is, incredibly inefficient. Sort of deliberately so as subsistence farmers form a pool of labour.
If you have tractors and related agricultural equipment and can fuel them, then food is not a problem. Any state that is say, 50% self sufficient in food production could increase output many fold. France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy could easily feed themselves.
I can’t resist pointing out that Silicon is actually … sand.
Apart from sources of energy, after the initial jolt, the crucial factor is going to be indigenous technology - a low level agrarian subsistence level economy is not that pleasant, but if you have the ability to fuel and maintain equipment, let alone build more, then you have a freed up labour force that can provide life’s luxuries.
Per the OP, the Vatican is considered part of Italy for this exercise. Otherwise the Swiss Guard is eating the College of Cardinals in a month.
I’ll bet North Korea could do it since they are practically doing it now.
They import food, but not enough and they export pretty much nothing.
Question for the OP: If two or more neighbouring countries decide to merge, do the force fields along their common border disappear? Because if they do, I imagine many of the smaller European countries doing just that. Places like Luxembourg, Monaco or Andorra could only survive by joining one of their larger neighbours. And I imagine the countries of the former Yugoslavia would swallow hard and re-unite.
In which case, the obvious solution is just forming a world-wide government, thus eliminating the problem all together.
It WOULD give people some motivation to make nice with eachother.
“For the love of cheesenips, India and Pakistan, cut it out or else they’ll put the forcefields back!”
Okay, but what’s the down side?
Well, I know that all the garlic in Italian food gives me bad breath.
Depends on the genie’s motivation. I tend to think it’s just screwing with humanity for the hell of it, so I doubt mergers are allowed. Communication is only permitted because it amuses Q.
But if the genie is doing this to take humanity to the woodshed, then yes, your scenario would work.
Canada has a pretty large steel industry.
Canada’s economy as it is presently organized would be utterly devastated, since so much of it is organized around exporting things. Canada has an enormous foreign trade surplus. But in terms of SURVIVAL, of course Canada could last pretty much forever under current circumstances. It has far more resources than its population needs.
Sam has nailed the central fact; the standard of living in any country that isn’t already a shithole will plummet. In the long run Canada would do fine to keep everyone alive, but we sure as hell wouldn’t be as rich as we are now.
Coal?! Pfsh…gasahol. What do you think we’re going to be doing with all that corn and wheat that we can’t export anymore? The “breadbasket of the world” would be filling the US’s gas tanks.