Transcript - Izzit.org

MAN: Don’t worry. It’s bound to be a mild winter. I can feel it in my bones.
WOMAN: In a bad year there’s no surplus to put by. We have to rely on what’s dug out of the frozen
earth, if anything.
MAN: And, if you’re really unlucky, it can mean starvation.
WOMAN: A mild winter, you said.
MAN: Don’t worry, it won’t last, you’ll see. But somehow or other, people did survive. After all, we
couldn’t be here talking about it if we hadn’t, could we
WOMAN: That’s true. We had everything – snow, flood, wild animals – yet we survived. Still, there
was one thing we didn’t have much of.
MAN: What’s that
WOMAN: Choice. For instance, they can’t choose one job in preference to another. They just do
whatever’s necessary to stay alive and they do it hour in and hour out, day in and day out, week in and
week out.
MAN: This way of living is called a subsistence economy. It needs all the efforts of every able-bodied
member of the community just to stay the way they are now.
WOMAN: And there’s nothing to spare for anyone else. Anything they don’t need for themselves
today- they keep for themselves tomorrow. And all this isn’t just a piece of history or a bit of
imagination; it all happened thousands of years ago. It’s true…and it’s still happening today, for real.
MAN: You know, about a quarter of all the people in the world today live on less than one dollar a day.
They produce barely enough for their basic daily needs and sometimes not even that.
WOMAN: In a poor country like this, for instance, approximately ninety-five percent of all adults work
on the land. They are very poor and their lives are very hard. Of course, there are always those at the top
who do very nicely even in a country like this- but most are constantly threatened by disease and famine.
People like this are essentially living like their ancestors.
MAN: They are on the very bottom of the economic ladder. They are one step above extinction. Ninetyfive
percent of the population of many developing countries work to produce food just for themselves,
and that leaves hardly anybody else to produce other goods and services.
WOMAN: In Britain, only about one percent of the people work in agriculture, but more than half the
food they use is produced on our own farms.
MAN: In the U.S. just two percent of the population are farmers or farm workers- and they produce
enough to feed the remaining ninety-eight percent of the American population, with enough left over to
export vast quantities to the rest of the world.
WOMAN: An American farmer producing one thousand tons of wheat a year will only need a few
hundred pounds of it for his family. What he does, in effect, is to swap the wheat he doesn’t need for cars
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