Considerable controversy continues to exist in scientific and policy circles about how to tackle issues of global hunger, malnutrition, and rural economic decline, as well as environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and climate change adaptation. On the one hand, powerful vested interests, with close ties to government, media, and academic institutions, propose high-input technology-base...

Amid expectations for a European ‘transition to sustainable agriculture’, there are competing transitional processes. Given the widely acknowledged harm from agro-industrial systems, unsustainable agriculture has divergent diagnoses and innovative solutions. In the EU policy context of a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE), there are also divergent accounts of its key terms: biological resources...

The concentration and centralization of capital is one of the fundamental general tendencies of the capitalist mode of production. This tendency applies, in Marx's view, to the agricultural as well as the industrial sector.' In Lenin's words: "The fundamental and principal trend of capitalism is the displacement of small-scale production by large-scale production, both in industry and in agricu...

The expansion of trade in pre-industrial Europe led to a transformation of agriculture. It induced specialization to exploit comparative advantage as well as a restructuring of the process of production, with manorial agriculture giving way to an agriculture of family farms. Technological progress was not itself a driving force, but rather a consequence of this transformation. Merchants and urb...

This paper discusses the implications of using genetically modified crops to biomanufacture pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds from the perspective of their co-existence with conventional agriculture. Such plant-made pharmaceuticals and plantmade industrial products rely on exciting scientific and technological breakthroughs and promise new opportunities for the agricultural sector, but t...

In earlier debates on economic development, the agricultural sector’s role was somewhat controversial. While dualistic models highlighted the importance of agriculture, the mainstream literature placed a greater emphasis on the creation of a modern industrial sector. Soon agriculture disappeared from the mainstream development literature to re-emerge recently with a variety of multiple-sector g...

Both economic theory and modern economic history show that productivity growth in non-agricultural sectors has consistently outweighed that of the agricultural sector. Thus, as development progresses, employment, which had been centered around the agricultural sector, becomes more and more dependent on the industrial and services sectors. This relationship between economic growth, and the move ...

The Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture, which made possible the rapid technological progress that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution, is one of the most important events in thousands of years of humankind’s economic development. In this paper we present theory and evidence showing that geography and biogeography exerted decisive influence on the lo...