Subsistence economy

About: Subsistence economy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1345 publications have been published within this topic receiving 32158 citations.

The impact of climate change on smallholder and subsistence agriculture.

Abstract: Some of the most important impacts of global climate change will be felt among the populations, predominantly in developing countries, referred to as “subsistence” or “smallholder” farmers. Their vulnerability to climate change comes both from being predominantly located in the tropics, and from various socioeconomic, demographic, and policy trends limiting their capacity to adapt to change. However, these impacts will be difficult to model or predict because of (i) the lack of standardised definitions of these sorts of farming system, and therefore of standard data above the national level, (ii) intrinsic characteristics of these systems, particularly their complexity, their location-specificity, and their integration of agricultural and nonagricultural livelihood strategies, and (iii) their vulnerability to a range of climate-related and other stressors. Some recent work relevant to these farming systems is reviewed, a conceptual framework for understanding the diverse forms of impacts in an integrated manner is proposed, and future research needs are identified.

Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract: Preface to the Second EditionPreface to the First EditionForewordIntroduction5IThree Basic Rights111Security and Subsistence132Correlative Duties353Liberty65IIThree Challenges to Subsistence Rights894Realism and Responsibility915Affluence and Responsibility1116Nationality and Responsibility131Afterword: Right-grounded Duties and the International Turn153Notes181Bibliography229Index231

Coming into the Country: Early Paleoindian Hunting and Mobility

Abstract: Hunter-gatherer adaptations to long-term fluctuations in regional resource structure require mechanisms to cope with periodic subsistence stresses. Among documented groups, a common response to such stress is temporary movement into adjacent occupied areas-moving in with "relatives" when things go wrong. However, in the case of early (ca. 12,000-10,000 B.P.) Paleoindian groups in the Americas, the availability of neighboring groups with a detailed knowledge of local resource geography could not be relied upon. Post-Pleistocene environmental changes and the low initial population of the New World are important factors conditioning a lifeway characterized by a dependence on hunting (though not exclusively of megafauna), and by high residential, logistical, and range (territorial) mobility. Early Paleoindian groups had to adopt a subsistence technology that could be employed regardless of the specific resource microstructure. In some regards, Paleoindians seem to have behaved like tropical foragers while in others like arctic collectors. Use of high quality lithic raw materials from large quarry sources, reliance on a bifacial technology, limited use of caves and rockshelters, and a low level of processing of food products for storage all may be indicative of such a subsistence technology, which would have been unlike that of any modern hunter-gatherers.

Productivity, health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low-income countries

Abstract: A model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition, labor-market productivity, health heterogeneity, and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy. Empirical results, based on a sample of households from Bangladesh, indicate that, despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption, households are averse to inequality. Furthermore, consistent with the model, the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status. Copyright 1990 by American Economic Association.

Was agriculture impossible during the pleistocene but mandatory during the holocene? a climate change hypothesis

Abstract: Several independent trajectories of subsistence intensijcation, often leading to agriculture, began during the Holocene. No plant-rich intensijcations are known from the Pleistocene, even from the late Pleistocene when human populations were otherwise quite sophisticated. Recent data from ice and ocean-core climate proxies show that last glacial climates were extremely hostile to agriculture-dry, low in atmospheric CO,, and extremely variable on quite short time scales. We hypothesize that agriculture was impossible under last-glacial conditions. The quite abruptfinal amelioration of the climate was followed immediately by the beginnings of plant-intensive resource-use strategies in some areas, although the turn to plants was much later elsewhere. Almost all trajectories of subsistence intensijcation in the Holocene are progressive, and eventually agriculture became the dominant strategy in all but marginal environments. We hypothesize that, in the Holocene, agriculture was, in the long run, compulsory. We use a mathematical analysis to argue that the rate-limiting process for intensijcation trajectories must generally be the rate of innovation of subsistence technology or subsistence-related social organization. At the observed rates of innovation, population growth will always be rapid enough to sustain a high level of population pressure. Several processes appear to retard rates of cultural evolution below the maxima we observe in the most favorable cases.