The future of modernized agriculture and the return of traditional techniques

Abstract

The industrialization of the agricultural sector has resolved, at least in Europe and in the United States, the thousand year-old problem of the lack of food. Unfortunately, during the last years the limits of such an agriculture clearly exploded. The modernized agriculture, in fact, produces negative externalities and it does not assure food safety. Through our contribution we hypothesize three future scenarios for modernized agriculture. We shall study in particular the one that foresees the conversion to sustainability through the return of traditional techniques. In order to analyze the problem, we shall introduce the Sraffian framework of the “re-switching of techniques”. Finally we shall build an original and new model of “reswitching” for the short period. The aim of our work is to show that, at least theoretically, it is possible that a traditional agricultural technique could be convenient in a context of both low and high profit level