The Rural World: a Lost Paradise between Technology and Intensive Exploitation

This study examines the ability of technology to "save" the world from hunger. Technological progress in the last two centuries has increasingly become exogenous with inventions and innovations introduced by productive fields unrelated to agriculture, such as chemistry, mechanics and biotech. These innovations are all labor-saving and capital-using and therefore out of the economic possibilities of small farmers whose revenues are compressed upstream by input producers. The agricultural squeeze is a myth that needs to be debunked due to the increase in agricultural productivity, while the most important is the agricultural spread, a consequence of the elimination of agriculture from the downstream phases of the food chain to the benefit of industrialists and traders. The most important landscape-environmental impacts were the social and human desertification of the countryside and the uniformization of the rural landscape. Despite the reference to the myth of the rural world, the problem remains and it is not known where it will go with the explosion of the population in 2050. What are the long-term strategies able to give results? This is one of the questions this study has tried to answer.