Wellmann Imre szerk.: A Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum Közleményei 1971-1972 (Budapest, 1973)

Fussel, George Edwin: What is traditional agriculture

WHAT IS TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURE GEORGE EDWIN FUSSELL (Sudbury, United Kingdom) I should not like anyone in the audience to think that I do not understand what is meant today by the term "traditional agriculture", that is in its application to present day problems. The word "traditional", used in this connexion, seems now to have a specific and limited meaning. I do not know what the intention was when the title "Transforming traditional agriculture" was chosen for. the third section of the Congress, but it seems to me to be rather indefinite. Does it apply only to the present day, or does it apply to the progress made during all historical time, and indeed to prehistory? I ask this question because men have been transforming traditional agriculture since the beginning of time, and I should like to have a precise and definite meaning attached to the expression. : This is because I feel that just as soon as a word or phrase becomes common currency in speaking or writing about any subject, and is ordinarily used to describe an event, series of events, or some scientific idiosyncracy, everybody who is tempted to use it should stop and think. Has the word or phrase become proverbial, and therefore used and accepted quite uncritically? Is it used, as so often happens, to conceal an hiatus in our knowledge? Has it any real meaning? Has it lost its descriptive power that it had when first used by some individual? Have the circumstances that made it useful changed, or indeed has its mere repetition made it more precise than it was? These questions can and must be asked about any accepted canon, and the words "traditional agriculture" cannot and must not escape this universal criticism. No doubt the words have a meaning, but just what is that meaning? Is it possibly different for each one of us? Dare I say that today only backward peoples practice a traditional agriculture? This adjective is generally used as a synonym for primitive that is, primitive in the sense of the farming methods of countries where they have not been modified essentially for thousands of years, e.g., Africa and some parts of Asia; but I should like to ask, of myself as well as others, how long must a system be practised before it becomes traditional: after what length of time if any period can be stated in answer to this question? What of modern Europe? And indeed modern North America, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina? In many parts of these places a very highly mechanized scientific, and very productive agriculture is usual. Will these methods be termed traditional some time in the future when they have been modified out of all recognition? They, too, have been developed mainly in