Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for 2.3 percent of GDP and only 2 percent of the labor
force is employed in agriculture. The tertiary sector in
Canada accounts for 75 percent of the labor force and
over 71 percent of GDP, and the tertiary sector in
Guatemala accounts for 35 percent of the labor force and
62 percent of the country's GDP.
These data do not tell us exactly how goods are pro-
duced, but they are revealing. The high proportion of the
labor force involved in agriculture in Guatemala (relative to
the role of agriculture in the GDP) tells us that agriculture
is still quite labor dependent in Guatemala, implying a lack
of mechanization. In Canada, the United States, and the
rest of the global economic core, agriculture is produced on
a large scale for commercial consumption. When agricul-
tural goods are produced in these ways, the number of peo-
ple working directly in the fi eld is quite small. In the United
States, less than 2 percent of the workforce is involved in
agricultural production. Thousands of others participate in
supporting agricultural production by working in the ter-
tiary sector as research scientists for universities, seed com-
panies, or chemical (antibiotics, pesticides, and herbicides)
producers; as lobbyists for industry groups such as wheat
producers or cattle ranchers; as engineers who design farm
implements; as the people who sell and repair the imple-
ments; and as owners and clerks at retail establishments
where farmers buy other farm and nonfarm goods.
In the United States, total agricultural production is at
an all-time high, but the proportion of the labor force in agri-
culture is at an all-time low. Mechanization and effi ciencies
created by new technologies have led to a signifi cant decrease
in the number of workers needed in agricultural production.
In 1950, one farmer in the United States produced enough
to feed 27 people; today, one farmer in the United States pro-
duces enough to feed 135 people. The mechanization of
agriculture goes beyond machinery such as combines and
harvesters. New technologies include hybrid seeds and
genetically engineered crops, pesticides, and herbicides, all
of which are designed to increase yields. The drive toward
economic effi ciency has meant that the average size of farms
(acres in production) in the United States has been growing,
regardless of the kind of agricultural good produced. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps data showing the dol-
lar value of agricultural production. The farms with the
highest total production have at least $500,000 in annual
production in 2007 dollars. These high-producing farms
accounted for 53.7 percent of agricultural goods produced in
2007 (compared with 28.9 percent in 1989).
Agriculture in the United States has changed enor-
mously in the last decade. A recent study by the National
Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
identifi es four major issues that affect food security world-
wide: “1) varying abilities to balance production and con-
sumption across regions and countries, 2) accelerating
conversions of agricultural land to urban uses, 3) increas-
ingly energy-intensive food production methods in a world
WHAT IS AGRICULTURE, AND WHERE DID
AGRICULTURE BEGIN?
Agriculture
is the deliberate tending of crops and
livestock to produce food, feed, fi ber, and fuel. When we
think about agriculture, we tend to think about the pro-
duction of foodstuffs for humans. Grain is also used for
feed
, grains fed directly to livestock. Raising livestock for
their milk, eggs, or meat makes up a large segment of U.S.
agriculture. Feed also comes from the remnants of biofuel
production, and in 2009, 25 percent of all grain produced
in the United States was used to produce fuel for cars, not
for human or animal consumption.
A common way of classifying economic activities is to
focus on what is being produced. Economic activities that
involve the extraction of economically valuable products
from the earth, including agriculture, ranching, hunting and
gathering, fi shing, forestry, mining, and quarrying, are called
primary economic activities.
Both the growing of food or
feed and the raising of livestock are considered primary eco-
nomic activities. Activities that take a primary product and
change it into something else such as toys, ships, processed
foods, chemicals, and buildings are
secondary economic
activities
. Manufacturing is the principal secondary eco-
nomic activity.
Tertiary economic activities
are those ser-
vice industries that connect producers to consumers and
facilitate commerce and trade or help people meet their
needs. People who work as bankers, lawyers, doctors, teach-
ers, nurses, salespeople, clerks, and secretaries belong to the
tertiary sector. Some analysts separate specialized services
into
quaternary
and
quinary economic activities
, distin-
guishing between those services concerned with information
or the exchange of money or goods (quaternary) and those
tied to research or higher education (quinary). In this chap-
ter, however, for simplicity's sake we limit ourselves to three
categories: primary, secondary, and a broadly conceived ter-
tiary or service sector.
By classifying economic activities into sectors and
analyzing the percentage of the population employed in
each sector, we can gain insight into how the production
of goods is organized, as well as the employment struc-
tures of different societies. As we explained in our discus-
sions of world-systems theory in Chapters 8 and 10, the
story of any product (such as wheat or rice) can be better
illuminated by focusing on how the good is produced (the
kinds of technology, research, wages, and education that
go into its production), rather than focusing simply on
what is produced. Examining the proportion of people
employed in a given economic sector gives us a basic idea
of how the good is produced. For example, in Guatemala
the agriculture sector accounts for 13.5 percent of the
country's gross domestic product (GDP), yet 50 percent
of the labor force is employed in agriculture. Contrast
that with Canada, where the agriculture sector accounts
