SUBSISTENCE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES
All the world’s three billion
people are supported by economic activity of one sort or another. Given such a
bewildering amount of activity, how can we detec the patterns by which it’s
organized from place to place? In a sense, doing so is precisely the task of
economic geography.
In terms of number of workers, the world’s leading economic activity is
agriculture, for about 75 per cent of the procedurs on earth are
agriculturalists. Manufacturing engages about 10 per cent of the world’s labor
force. Trade, transportasion, and service account for 12 per cent. The
remaining 3 per cent buys themselves in mining, fishing, and forestry.
In this book we shall apply the
geographic method of analysis to, and organize our discussion around, production rather than comsumption. We do so for two reasons.
First, spatial variation is more pronounced for the former than the latter.
Coffee-drinkers are more ubiquitous than coffee-growers; paper is consumed in
almost every inhabited are of the world, but paper is manufactured in only a
few spots; and although the consumption of cotton is well-nigh universal,cotton
growing and cotton-textile production are carried on only in certain specific
regions that can be clearly delimited. Second, there is much less information,
scientifically analyzed, about consumption compared to the information dealing
with production.
For our purposes, we can
divide production efforts into two
great categories subsistenc e and commercial. In subsistenceendeavors, each producer lives directly on what he
produces. He bends all his efforts to meeting the immediate needs of himself
and family and so has little left over for bartering or selling. He and the
members of his family must provide the food they eat, the clothes they wear,
the fuel that warms them, the dwelling that shelters them, the implements they
use, and any items of culture they enjoy.
In commercial economie,by contrast, each producer generates a surplus
of something that he can exchange for surpluses of other things others produce.
Little of his effort goes into directly providing the food, clothing, fuel, and
shelter his family neends.
The basic distinction
between subsistence and commercial economies lies, then, in the soure of
satisfaction of economic needs. Obviously, there are variations in the degrees
of either subsistence or commercial economies. Businessmen who live in city
apartment houses are entirely dependent on other producers for every one of
their economic needs. Primitive tropical tribesmen who avoid contact with
outsiders provide themselves with everything they consume. But in between these
two extremes are countless shadings – areas in which the economy is partly
subsistence and partly commercial.
We shall confine our
discussion to regions that are clearly either subsistence or commercial – or at
least we shall confine our chapter headings to such activities. For now, in
Part Two, we shall deal primarily with subsistence economies, while Chapter 4
deal with a more advanced activity- intensive subsistence cultivation
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