A new paradigm in agricultural economics: adaptation to global challenges

Csete, László

Keywords: paradigm, challenges, climate change, sustainability, globalization.

It is very important to get aquainted with paradigms as well as with the results and experiences of agricultural economics and farm management abroad. Nevertheless, instead of a following strategy research initiatives focusing on expectable changes and their impacts can best serve safety and interests of domestic agriculture and food supply in the quickly reshaping, more and more complex and dangerous world. The different (biological, economic, social) processes are either not or hardly influencable, often at the expense of extraordinary efforts and at a very slow rate. Therefore researches of far-seeing adaptation to global challenges are necessary, let these challenges be climate change, sustainability or globalization, all of which requires their own research, but even more deciding, urgent and new problem is discovering their trade-offs. The outlined paradigm would focus on these trade-offs, with agricultural economics in its centre but rested also on other subjects, so properly speaking it is a transdisciplinary paradigm.
Research work on adaptation to global challenges and their trade-offs is worth to do on several path simultaneously including reevaluation of past results, discovering proved and extensible procedures of production practice, and searching for solutions to problems so far unanswered.
Time presses, therefore research plans and preliminary results should be communicated with a broad circle of professionals and practical results should be transferred to users i.e. to administration and producers.

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