Primary Activities: Gathering, Pastoralism, Agriculture and Mining

1. Economic activities and the primary sector

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• Economic activity: any human activity that earns income. Economic activities fall into four groups: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary. Quinary is a further sub-group (see tertiary-quaternary-activities).
• Primary activities depend directly on the environment. They use land, water, vegetation, building materials and minerals. The set is: hunting and gathering, pastoral activities, fishing, forestry, agriculture, and mining and quarrying.
• Red-collar workers: people in primary work, named so because they work outdoors. The other collar colours (white, blue, gold, grey, pink) are taught in tertiary-quaternary-activities.
• NCERT's opening question: why do people on the coast fish while people on the plains farm?
• Physical factors: relief, climate, soil, water, coastline.

• Social factors: population density, technology, capital, markets, tradition.

• Beyond NCERT: the share of workers in primary activities falls as a country develops. It is about 2–5% in rich countries and about 45% in India (PLFS; verify current).

2. Hunting, gathering and fishing

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• Hunting and gathering are the oldest economic activities. Early people ate wild animals they hunted and plants they gathered nearby. People in very cold and very hot climates lived by hunting. Their stone, twig and arrow tools kept kills low. Today poaching has pushed species to extinction, so hunting is banned in India (Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972).
• Subsistence gathering happens in harsh climates. It needs little capital, uses very simple technology, gives very little per person and leaves little or no surplus (extra to sell).
• High latitudes: northern Canada, northern Eurasia, southern Chile.

• Low latitudes: Amazon Basin, tropical Africa, northern fringe of Australia, interior Southeast Asia (Fig. 4.2).

• Commercial gathering collects plant products, processes them simply and sells them:

• bark gives quinine, tannin and cork
• leaves give beverages, drugs, cosmetics, fibres and thatch
• nuts give food and oil
• trunks give rubber, balata, gums and resins

It cannot grow worldwide because synthetic products are cheaper and often better.

• Chicle is the milky juice of the zapota (sapodilla) tree of Central America. It was the old base of chewing gum, which now mostly uses synthetic gum base.
• Major fishing grounds lie on wide, shallow continental shelves and where cold and warm currents meet or cold water rises from below (upwelling):
• North-East Atlantic: Dogger Bank in the North Sea
• North-West Atlantic: Grand Banks, where the Labrador Current meets the Gulf Stream
• North-West Pacific off Japan: where the Kuroshio and Oyashio meet

• Peru–Chile coast: Humboldt upwelling feeds anchoveta, which El Niño hurts

• Aquaculture means farming fish, shellfish and seaweed in controlled waters. FAO's SOFIA 2024 found that in 2022 aquaculture produced more aquatic animals than capture fishing for the first time. China is the largest producer and India second (verify current).

3. Pastoralism: nomadic herding, transhumance and commercial ranching

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• Pastoralism means rearing tamed animals chosen to suit the local climate. It probably began once hunting proved unsustainable. It runs at subsistence or commercial level.
• Nomadic herding is primitive subsistence. Herders get food, clothing, shelter, tools and transport from their animals. They move with them for pasture and water, inside a traditional territory. Animals by region:
• tropical Africa: cattle
• Sahara and Asiatic deserts: sheep, goats, camels
• Tibet and the Andes: yak and llama

• Arctic and sub-Arctic: reindeer

• Regions of pastoral nomadism (Fig. 4.4): 1. the core, from the Atlantic shores of North Africa across Arabia to Mongolia and Central China 2. the Eurasian tundra 3. small areas of south-west Africa and Madagascar

Numbers are falling because of political boundaries and settlement schemes.

• Transhumance is seasonal movement: up to mountain pastures in summer, down to the plains in winter. Himalayan groups that practise it:
• Gujjars: buffalo herders of J&K, Himachal and Uttarakhand (Van Gujjars)
• Bakarwals: goat and sheep herders of J&K (Pir Panjal summers, Jammu winters)
• Gaddis: Himachal
• Bhotiyas: Uttarakhand and Sikkim, trans-Himalayan traders who use alpine bugyals

In the tundra, herders go north in summer and south in winter.

• Commercial livestock rearing is organised and capital-heavy.
• It runs on permanent ranches split into fenced parcels.
• Only one kind of animal is kept: sheep, cattle, goats or horses.
• It uses scientific breeding and disease control.
• Meat, wool and hides are exported.

• Main countries: New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Uruguay, USA (Fig. 4.6).

• Carrying capacity of pasture is how many animals a pasture can feed without being damaged. Ranchers keep herds within it and move them to a new parcel once the grass is grazed.

	Nomadic herding	Commercial ranching
Aim	Subsistence	Market, export
Base	Mobile	Fixed, fenced ranch
Herd	Mixed animals	One species
Capital	Low	High, scientific

4. Subsistence agriculture: shifting cultivation and intensive farming of monsoon Asia

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• Subsistence agriculture: the farming area eats all or nearly all of what it grows. It has two types: primitive and intensive.

• Shifting cultivation (slash and burn) is the primitive type. Tribes practise it in the tropics of Africa, South and Central America and Southeast Asia (Fig. 4.7). How it works: 1. Forest is cleared by fire, and the ash makes the soil fertile. 2. Small patches are worked with sticks and hoes. 3. After 3–5 years the soil wears out, so the farmer clears a new patch.

• Jhum cycle: the fallow (rest) gap before the farmer returns to an old patch. As population grows, this gap keeps getting shorter, so the soil cannot recover and the land degrades. That is why "the future of shifting cultivation is bleak".

• Names of shifting cultivation worldwide: Jhuming (NE India), Milpa (Mexico, Central America), Ladang (Indonesia, Malaysia), Conuco (Venezuela), Roca (Brazil), Masole (Central Africa), Ray (Vietnam).
• Intensive subsistence agriculture belongs to crowded monsoon Asia (Fig. 4.8). With so many people per hectare, every plot must be farmed hard.
• Wet paddy dominated intensive subsistence agriculture: rice leads. Holdings are tiny. Family labour and hand work replace machines, and farmyard manure keeps the soil fertile. Yield per hectare is high but output per worker is low.

• Intensive subsistence agriculture dominated by non-paddy crops: grown where relief, climate or soil rule out paddy, often with irrigation. Wheat, soybean, barley and sorghum grow in N China, Manchuria, North Korea and N Japan. Wheat grows in the western Indo-Gangetic plains, and millets in dry western and southern India.

• Major rice exporters: India is first, with about 40% of world trade, followed by Thailand, Vietnam and Pakistan. Export rice comes from deltas and irrigated plains such as the Ganga–Brahmaputra, Mekong, Chao Phraya and Indus. India curbed exports in 2022–24 and eased the curbs in 2024 (verify current).

5. Plantation agriculture and the tropical cash crops

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• Plantation agriculture is large-scale, profit-led farming that Europeans brought to tropical colonies. Crops: tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber, cotton, oil palm, sugarcane, bananas, pineapples.
• Features: large estates, heavy capital, managers and technical support, scientific methods, a single crop, cheap labour, and good transport linking estates to factories and ports.
• Colonial pattern:
• French: cocoa and coffee in West Africa
• British: tea in India and Sri Lanka, rubber in Malaysia, sugarcane and bananas in the West Indies
• Spanish and Americans: coconut and sugarcane in the Philippines

• Dutch: once held a sugarcane monopoly in Indonesia

• Fazenda: a large coffee estate of Brazil. Some are still run by Europeans.

• Ownership: most plantations now belong to governments or nationals (NCERT). Their labour history ties to slavery and indentured labour.
• Agri-business is industrial-scale farming paid for by firms whose main business is outside farming, such as corporations that own tea estates. Its farms are big, mechanised, chemical-heavy "agro-factories" (Class 12, Secondary Activities).
• Cocoa belt: cocoa needs hot, humid, shaded equatorial lowlands. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana grow about 60% of the world's cocoa. Prices spiked in 2023–24 (verify current).
• Coffee-producing regions: coffee grows on frost-free tropical highlands. Producers in order: Brazil, Vietnam (robusta), Colombia, Indonesia, Ethiopia (home of arabica) (verify current).
• Palm oil comes from hot, wet equatorial lowlands. Indonesia and Malaysia make about 85% of it, often on cleared rainforest and peat. India is the largest importer. India's National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (2021) targets the North-East and Andamans. The start of the EU Deforestation Regulation has been postponed (verify current).

6. Extensive commercial grain cultivation and the world's breadbaskets

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• Extensive commercial grain cultivation happens in the interior semi-arid grasslands of the mid-latitudes. Wheat is the main crop, with corn, barley, oats and rye.
• Farms are huge and fully mechanised: combine crews harvest many hectares a day.
• Low yield per acre, high yield per person. Why:
• land is plentiful and labour is scarce

• rain is limited, so farmers put few inputs into each hectare

• Regions (Fig. 4.12): Eurasian steppes, Canadian and American Prairies, Pampas (Argentina), Velds (South Africa), Australian Downs, Canterbury Plains (New Zealand). Trap: the Amazon Basin is not one of them.

• The regions are temperate grasslands, often with fertile chernozem (black) soils.
• Black Sea grain trade: Russia is the largest wheat exporter and Ukraine a major one. Grain ships from Novorossiysk and Odesa through the Bosporus.
• The UN–Turkey Black Sea Grain Initiative ran from July 2022 until Russia quit in July 2023.

• After that, Ukraine used its own sea corridor (verify current).

• Other exporters: EU, Canada, Australia, USA, Argentina. North Africa and West Asia depend on imports, so they are exposed when a chokepoint is blocked.

7. Mixed farming, dairy farming and Mediterranean agriculture

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• Mixed farming belongs to highly developed regions: NW Europe, eastern North America, parts of Eurasia and the temperate southern continents (Fig. 4.14).
• Farms are moderate in size and grow wheat, barley, oats, rye, maize, fodder and root crops.
• Crops and livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry) get equal weight.
• It needs high capital, chemical and green manures, and skilled farmers.

• Trap: mixed farming is not monoculture (one crop only).

• Crop rotation: growing different crops one after another on the same field. Intercropping: growing two or more crops together at the same time. Both keep the soil fertile.

• Corn Belt: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Nebraska. Maize and soybeans grow there, mostly to feed hogs and cattle, which makes the USA the largest maize producer (verify current).
• Dairy farming is the most advanced way of rearing milch animals.
• It is highly capital intensive: sheds, fodder storage, milking machines.
• It is highly labour intensive: there is no off-season.
• It sits near cities. Refrigeration and pasteurisation let products keep longer.
• Regions: NW Europe (largest), Canada, and SE Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania (Fig. 4.16).

• India is the largest milk producer, built on co-operatives (Operation Flood, 1970) (verify current).

• Mediterranean agriculture: specialised commercial farming in Csa/Csb climates. These are both sides of the Mediterranean (North Africa from Tunisia to the Atlantic), southern California, central Chile, SW South Africa, and S and SW Australia.

• It supplies citrus fruits, olives and figs.

• It grows valuable fruit and vegetables in winter, when European and North American demand is high.

• Viticulture (grape growing) is its speciality. Good grapes make the best wines, and poorer grapes are dried into raisins and currants.

8. Market gardening, truck farming and factory farming: distance to market

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• Market gardening and horticulture grow high-value vegetables, fruits and flowers only for city markets.
• Farms are small and have good transport links to well-off city buyers.
• The system is labour and capital intensive. It uses irrigation, HYV seeds, fertilisers, insecticides and greenhouses, with artificial heating in cold areas.

• Regions: NW Europe, NE USA, Mediterranean lands.

• Floriculture is growing flowers. The Netherlands specialises in tulips, which are flown to all major European cities. Trap: flower growing is floriculture, not truck farming.

• Truck farming grows vegetables only. A farm can be no farther from market than a truck can drive overnight.
• Factory farming is found in Western Europe and North America. Poultry and cattle are kept in stalls and pens and fed manufactured feed. It needs heavy capital, vets, heating and lighting, and careful breed selection.
• Von Thunen model (The Isolated State, 1826) imagines one town on a flat, uniform plain.
• Transport cost rises with distance from the town, so land rent falls.
• This gives rings, from the centre outward: market gardening and dairying, then forestry, then grain, then ranching.

• Refrigeration and air freight (Kenyan flowers, Dutch tulips) bend the rings.

• Precision agriculture uses GPS, soil sensors, drones and satellite images to put water, seed, fertiliser and pesticide exactly where they are needed. Indian examples: Kisan drones, Digital Agriculture Mission (2024), soil health cards (verify current).

9. Farming organisation: co-operative and collective farming

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• NCERT also groups farming by organisation: how farmers own farms and how state policy runs them.
• Co-operative farming: farmers pool their resources in a society by choice, and each keeps their own farm.
• The society buys inputs, sells produce on the best terms and processes it cheaply.
• The movement began over a century ago. It worked best in Denmark (nearly every farmer is a member), and also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Italy.

• In India: dairy and sugar co-operatives of Gujarat and Maharashtra, and the Ministry of Co-operation (2021).

• Collective farming rests on social ownership of the means of production and shared labour.

• The Soviet kolkhoz began in 1928 under Stalin's forced collectivisation.
• Its aims were to fix inefficient old methods and boost output for self-sufficiency.

• Farmers pooled land, livestock and labour but kept tiny plots for daily needs.

• Beyond NCERT:

• sovkhoz were state farms, unlike the kolkhoz collective farms
• collectivisation brought famine and peasant resistance
• China set up communes in 1958 and replaced them with the household responsibility system from 1978
• collectives broke up after the USSR ended in 1991

NCERT's present tense (Kazakhstan photo, Fig. 4.15 b) is dated.

	Co-operative	Collective
Joining	Voluntary	State-driven
Ownership	Private farms kept	Social ownership

10. Mining: factors and methods

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• Mining means taking minerals out of the earth. Minerals named the copper, bronze and iron ages, but early use was only for tools, pots and weapons. Real mining began with the Industrial Revolution.
• Factors affecting mining activity:
• Physical: size, grade and mode of occurrence of the deposit.
• Economic: demand, technology, capital for infrastructure, labour and transport costs.

• A low-grade deposit becomes worth mining when prices rise or technology improves.

• Open-cast mining is for minerals near the surface. The covering layer (overburden) is removed. It is the easiest and cheapest method, with low safety and equipment costs and large, quick output. But it scars land, displaces people and needs land reclamation.

• Underground mining (shaft method) is for deep ores. Vertical shafts are sunk and galleries branch out to the mineral. It needs lifts, drills, haulage and ventilation. It is risky: poisonous gases, fires, floods and roof collapse. Indian examples: Jharia coal fires and the Chasnala disaster (1975).
• Other methods: placer mining, dredging, offshore drilling (Fig. 4.18, Gulf of Mexico) and solution mining of lithium brines.
• The shift in where mining happens: rich countries are leaving mining and refining because labour costs are high. Labour-rich developing countries are growing in importance.
• Mineral-dependent economies: several African countries, and a few in South America and Asia, earn over 50% of their income from minerals alone. That leaves them exposed to price swings and the resource curse.
• Katanga–Zambia copper belt: copper and cobalt on the DR Congo–Zambia border, with towns such as Lubumbashi and Kolwezi (DRC) and Ndola and Kitwe (Zambia). The minerals draw dense population (Class 12, The World Population). The Benguela and TAZARA railways serve it. The DRC supplies about 70% of world cobalt (verify current).

11. World mineral regions and the critical-minerals race

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• Chilean copper belt: copper in the Andes and Atacama, from open pits at Escondida and Chuquicamata. Chile is first, the DR Congo second (it passed Peru in 2023) and Peru third (verify current).
• Lithium Triangle: where Argentina, Bolivia and Chile meet. It holds over half of known lithium, in brines under salt flats: Salar de Uyuni, Salar de Atacama, Hombre Muerto. The brine is evaporated in ponds that use scarce desert water. Australia mines hard-rock lithium. India's KABIL is exploring in Catamarca, Argentina.
• Pilbara (Western Australia): open-pit iron ore at Mount Tom Price and Mount Whaleback, shipped from Port Hedland and Dampier mostly to China. Australia is the largest producer, and Brazil's Carajás comes second (verify current).
• Bayan Obo (Inner Mongolia, near Baotou) is the world's largest rare-earth deposit.
• China's dominance in critical minerals: China refines most of the world's rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium and cobalt. It curbed exports of gallium, germanium and graphite in 2023 and of rare-earth technology and magnets in 2024–25 (verify current). Responses:
• Minerals Security Partnership (India joined 2023)
• Quad critical minerals initiative
• India's list of 30 critical minerals (2023) and National Critical Mineral Mission (2025)
• KABIL's overseas assets

• lithium find at Reasi, J&K (2023)

• Shale gas is gas trapped in fine-grained rock. It is freed by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (pumping in water, sand and chemicals under pressure).

• The Marcellus, Permian and Bakken fields made the USA the top oil and gas producer and an LNG exporter.
• Concerns: water use, polluted groundwater, earthquakes, methane leaks.

• India's potential lies in the Cambay, Krishna–Godavari, Cauvery and Damodar basins, but output is small (verify current).

• Deep-sea mining targets three things on the seabed beyond national control (the "Area", called the common heritage of mankind under UNCLOS Part XI):

• polymetallic nodules on abyssal plains (manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper)
• cobalt-rich crusts on seamounts

• sulphides at mid-ocean ridges

• International Seabed Authority (1994, Kingston, Jamaica) issues exploration contracts. It has no mining code yet.

• India holds three: nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, and sulphides on the Central/South-West Indian Ridge and the Carlsberg Ridge.
• India's Deep Ocean Mission (2021) includes Samudrayaan and the Matsya-6000 submersible.
• In 2025 the US moved to license seabed mining outside the ISA (verify current).

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Exam angles

Prelims — high-yield facts and traps

• Shifting cultivation names: Jhum–NE India; Milpa–Mexico/Central America; Ladang–Indonesia/Malaysia; Conuco–Venezuela; Roca–Brazil; Masole–Central Africa; Ray–Vietnam.
• Transhumant groups: Gujjars and Bakarwals–J&K; Gaddis–Himachal; Bhotiyas–Uttarakhand, Sikkim.
• Grain grasslands: Steppes (Eurasia), Prairies (N America), Pampas (Argentina), Velds (S Africa), Downs (Australia), Canterbury (NZ). "Amazon Basin grows extensive grain" – FALSE.
• "Extensive grain farming gives high yield per acre" – FALSE (it is low per acre, high per person). Wet paddy is the reverse.
• "Dairy farming has an off-season" – FALSE. "Mixed farming is monoculture" – FALSE.
• Mediterranean regions are on five continents (citrus, viticulture, winter vegetables). Dairy belts: NW Europe, Canada, SE Australia–NZ–Tasmania.
• Co-operative farming worked best in Denmark. Kolkhoz = Soviet collective. Plantations were brought by European colonists. Flower growing = floriculture.
• Open-cast is cheap, quick and shallow. Underground is deep, costly and risky. Physical factors (size, grade, occurrence) vs economic factors (demand, technology, capital, labour, transport).
• Pilbara–iron ore; Atacama–copper and lithium; Lithium Triangle–Argentina, Bolivia, Chile; Bayan Obo–rare earths; Katanga–Zambia–copper and cobalt.
• ISA is in Kingston, Jamaica. India has three seabed contracts, with nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin.
• In 2022 aquaculture passed capture fishing (FAO SOFIA 2024). Peru = upwelling ground; Grand Banks = Labrador Current meets Gulf Stream.

Mains — GS-I themes

1. Why farming systems differ across the world: climate, population density and distance to market (von Thunen).
2. Shifting cultivation: its ecological cost, the shrinking jhum cycle, and alternatives for the North-East.
3. Plantations as a colonial legacy: their features, labour history (slavery, indenture) and today's deforestation (palm oil, cocoa).
4. Why pastoral nomadism is declining, and the case for pastoral rights (Indian transhumant groups, Forest Rights Act).
5. Critical minerals and China's hold on refining: what it means for India's energy transition and supply security.
6. Deep-sea mining: resource promise vs ecological risk and the common heritage principle.
7. Food security and the geography of grain and rice exporters (Black Sea war, India's export curbs).

Current-affairs hooks

• China's export curbs on rare earths, gallium, germanium and graphite; National Critical Mineral Mission auctions; KABIL's assets abroad (verify current).
• ISA mining-code talks, calls for a moratorium, US seabed licensing outside the ISA.
• Black Sea shipping and wheat prices; changes in India's rice export policy.
• Cocoa and coffee price spikes from bad weather in West Africa and Brazil; EU Deforestation Regulation dates.
• FAO SOFIA reports on aquaculture and overfishing; WTO fisheries subsidies talks.
• Lithium exploration in the Lithium Triangle, Reasi (J&K) and Argentina's Catamarca.