Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
similar to that shown above for women. In rich countries where the proportion of farmers
is less than a single percentage of all those in work, it is easy to forget that worldwide one in
five workers work on the land. Some of the lowest incomes are recorded for these groups -
often there is no formal or regular income at all. In contrast, a few of the agricultural men
recorded in this map living in parts of the triad are extremely rich farmers - who have not
touched actual soil for many years.
Text Box 5.13: Agricultural Men
This map of where the men who are farmers live and work shows a broadly similar
distribution to the equivalent map for women. However a larger proportion of the
male agricultural workers of the world are found in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, as
compared with female. In total there are 1.4 male agricultural workers to every female
agricultural worker in the world.
The territory in which female agricultural workers made up the smallest percent-
age of the population, also had the second highest proportion of male agricultural
workers. That territory is the United Arab Emirates. The populations of Singapore
and Argentina have very low proportions of agricultural workers - both male and
female.
If I could live life again I would study. I would also continue to work in the
fields. If you only study, then you forget that someone needs to grow things to
eat and you can't eat money.
(Edgar, 2006)
5.2.13 Industrial men
In 2002 there were 519 million men working in industry around the world. When these
male industry workers are combined with their female counterparts, they make up almost
a quarter of all workers in the world. The work of these people is what supplies the other
half of the world's workforce, those who do not work, and of course the workers themselves,
with shoes, cars, clothes, ready meals and tea bags (amongst most other things). Yet as
the Worldmapper trade maps show, it is not only luxury items such as toys and valuables
that find their way mainly to the lands of the rich. More mundane items such as cars,
clothing, electronics and computers also arrive disproportionately where richer people live.
This is despite the men and women who produce all of these items together having a similar
distribution to that of total population (see Worldmapper Map 2 in Figure 5.1) - note that
particular industries have particular distributions: the highest net exports of vehicles are
from Japan and South Korea; high net machine exports are from Germany, Italy and Japan;
there are high net computer exports from Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan and
South Korea. Of course, high net earnings from exports are not necessarily related to the
work that goes into production.
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