A Review on the Evolution of Agribusiness in the 21st Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54536/ajebi.v4i3.6193Keywords:
Agricultural Economics, Digital Agriculture, Globalization, Green Revolution, Rural DevelopmentAbstract
The field of agribusiness has diversified further to include large scale of various disciplines such as sustainability, economics, business management and agriculture. This discussion traces the development of agribusiness that started as a conceptual idea by Davis in 1955 to its present position as a global scholarly discipline. Some of the significant changes it notes that have been realized between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries include the changes caused by automation and productivity-based systems to customer-centric systems, tech-enabled systems and sustainability-focused systems. There are arguments by some academics that agribusiness is a bad thing to the environment, corporate greed, and neoliberal policies, and others hold that agribusiness is good in terms of innovation, growth, and rural development. This review explores the redefinition of agribusiness, which alternative views agribusiness as a driver of development towards a more modern society and the source of inequity and environmental pressures. Examples of areas that have been identified as deficient include talks about the ethical consideration of digital agriculture, approaches to changing the climate change, and the social and political impacts of globalized value chains. New paradigms are emerging in order to discover the compromise between efficiency, inclusivity, and environmental responsibility, the bioeconomy and circular agriculture. In its essence agribusiness is one of the fields where the economic, social, and environmental interests clash, yet it has become a mighty force of change in food systems as well.
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