Extensive agriculture

The extensive agriculture is a agricultural System of production which does not maximize the Productivité ground. Generally practiced on the vast wide ones, it is characterized by relatively weak output S with the Hectare. The extensive agriculture is opposed to the Intensive agriculture, which is characterized by very high outputs with the hectare and whose extreme form is the Agriculture out-ground.

There exists in fact two forms of extensive agriculture:

a traditional form met in the countries of the Third world, which uses average techniques limited and a Main-d'oeuvre comparatively numerous, because of this low level of mechanization. Its extreme type is the itinerant Agriculture, still current in Africa and South America.
a modern form, very mechanized, specific to the industrialized countries “new” which have immense wide, in particular in North America or Central Asia (Kazakhstan), but often have a limited labor. In this case the extensive character refers only to the ground, the Productivité of the Main-d'oeuvre being on the contrary very high.

The persistence of these forms of extensive agriculture is related to various factors:

shortage of manpower,
lack of means financial (related to the Underdevelopment),
social structures of an area,
mode of property (latifundia),
conditions Climate ic (semi-arid zones) or natural (quality of the grounds) unfavourable.

It reveals in certain cases an insufficient control of the territory and requires, often, a Land reform.

In Europe, the extensive agriculture is comparable with traditional agriculture specific to certain disadvantaged regions under the angle of the natural conditions: mountain and hill farming, traditional agriculture of certain Mediterranean regions. The common Agricultural policy which supported at its beginnings the intensification of agriculture directs since its last reform, adopted in 2003, towards a clear desintensification, in particular by the decoupling of the subsidies compared to the production. Certain lobbies, like the Peasant confederation in France, preach the development of a certain form of extensive agriculture, considered as more durable, provided that it preserves the use and the level of income of the farmers.

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