Ageing in rural places

As the physical base for agriculture, land-related resources are crucial to sustaining human life. The meanings attached to land include social, cultural and spiritual dimensions. A market-based, view is that land is a tradable resource whose real value can be discovered through price signals. Farming and food systems are complex and their characteristics vary over time and space. One attempt to provide a typology of contemporary food systems identified three basic forms: traditional, modernizing and industrialized. Transnational and transcultural integration has been promoted through technology the personal computer, the Internet, modern transportation, biotechnology, nanotechnology and scientific innovation. Three common underlying trends to have, significance in the shape and performance of food systems are globalization, neoliberals and financialisation. The overall outcomes have been the entrenchment of productivitist agriculture, as part of modernizing and industrialized food production systems, and the constant pressure on traditional food systems to modernize, moving quickly to embrace the neoliberal trade regime and its corporate agribusiness future.