Reswitching of Techniques in the Modern Agriculture: a Theoretical Background

The industrialization of the agricultural sector has resolved, at least inEurope, United States and Japan, the thousand year-old problem of the lack of food.Unfortunately, during the last years the environmental limits of such an agricultureclearly exploded. Through our contribution we define the concepts of traditionaland modernized styles of farming. We also hypothesize three future scenarios formodernized agriculture. We shall study in particular the “return of techniques”scenario that foresees the conversion to sustainability through the return oftraditional techniques. In order to analyze this scenario, we shall introduce theSraffian framework of the “reswitching of techniques” from the neo-ricardiantheory (Sraffa 1960). Sraffa, within the “reswitching” framework, pointed out that alow-capital-intensive technique may be competitive both at a relatively low andhigh rate of profit. Finally, we shall show that, at least theoretically, it is possiblethat traditional agricultural techniques could be convenient in a context of both lowand high profit level