The primary sector

Economic activities in which people depend directly on nature to produce goods are called primary activities, or primary sector activities.

The primary sector is the group of activities that take raw materials straight from nature, such as farming, fishing and forestry. The key word is directly: nobody has handled the material before. It comes straight out of the soil, the water, the forest or the animal.

For example: growing grains and vegetables on farms, collecting wood from forests, extracting coal from mines, catching fish from fisheries, collecting eggs from poultry farms. All of these are primary activities.

The most common primary activities are agriculture, mining, fishing, raising livestock and forestry. The book pictures five: raising livestock, greenhouse farming, mining, forestry, and fish farming (a fishery).

'Primary' does not mean simple or old-fashioned. A greenhouse is modern engineering, and so is a deep mine. What makes them primary is only where the material comes from: straight from nature.

The book asks you: can you think of any primary activities you have seen? What natural resources do they use?