Primary activities: hunting and gathering

Human economic activities are grouped into four kinds: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary.

Primary activities depend directly on the environment, using the earth's resources: land, water, plants, building materials and minerals. They include hunting and gathering, pastoralism, fishing, forestry, agriculture and mining. People who do outdoor primary work are called 'red-collar' workers.

Hunting and gathering are the oldest economic activities. Early people lived on animals they hunted and on wild plants they collected. Today, hunting is banned in many places, and illegal hunting (poaching) has driven many species close to extinction.

Gathering still goes on in harsh climates, in two kinds of region:

• High latitudes: northern Canada, northern Eurasia, and southern Chile.
• Low latitudes: the Amazon basin, tropical Africa, northern Australia and the interior of south-east Asia.

Gatherers collect useful plants: leaves, bark and medicinal plants. Some gathering is commercial: quinine from bark, cork from the bark of the cork oak, and chicle, a type of gum used to make chewing gum, from the milky juice of the zapota tree.

Gathering needs little capital and low technology, and gives little surplus beyond what the gatherer's family needs. It is unlikely to become important worldwide: products from the wild cannot compete with synthetic substitutes, often of better quality and cheaper.