W. B. Morgan – författare

... we do not yet seem to have realised that the exchange of products between countries in one part of the world but at different stages of development is no less natural, and no less profitable for the various nations, than the exchange of products which differ because they grow in different climates' (Thiinen-Hall, xg66, p. 194). There have been few attempts to study agriculture within a spatial framework, notwithstanding the quintessential importance of land as a production factor. Land is most often treated as generalized environment although it could also be considered as social and economic space-social because even the most crowded of farming communities has much greater distance between its basic social units than exist within an urban-industrial agglomeration, and economic because distances to markets, to factor sources and to information must be overcome and frequently vary by type of market, factor and information source. Modem agricultural geography has been largely preoccupied with the development of techniques and with classification, often as ends in thexnselves, or with a geographical element consisting mainly of some general locational reference or regional description. Rarely has there been an attempt to identify a spatial structure associated with some particular agricultural enterprise* or practice.

This book identifies the pattern in a particular sector of the spatial economy. It analyses economies at a low level of development which are associated with distinctive forms of agricultural activity and explains their pattern at increasingly smaller scale: world, nation, village and farm.

Originally published in 1971, this book is a systematic study of the major features and factors of the location and distribution of global agricultural enterprises. Special emphasis is given to approaches to the subject developed by economists and economic geographers, but all aspects of agricultural geography are reviewed including physical environmental problems. An introduction to the problem of classification and data collection together with instruction in some simple analytical techniques is given to equip the student with the basic methods for their own research.