Cash crop

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Cash crop

In agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
, a cash crop is a crop which is grown for money

Money

Money is anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts. The main uses of money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value....
.

The term is used to differentiate from subsistence crops

Subsistence agriculture

Subsistence agriculture is self-sufficiency farming in which farmers grow only enough food to feed their family and pay taxes. The typical subsistence farm has a range of crops and animals needed by the family to eat during the year....
, which are those fed to the producer's own livestock or grown as food for the producer's family. In earlier times cash crops were usually only a small (but vital) part of a farm's total yield, while today, especially in the developed countries, almost all crops are mainly grown for cash. In non-developed nations, cash crops are usually crops which attract demand in more developed nations, and hence have some export value.

In many tropical and subtropical areas, jute

Jute

Jute is a long, soft, shiny vegetable fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. It is produced from plants in the genus Corchorus, family Tiliaceae....
, coffee

Coffee

Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted seeds, commonly called coffee beans, of the Coffea. Caffeinated coffee has a stimulating effect in humans....
, cocoa

Cocoa

Cocoa is the dried and fully fermented fatty seed of the cacao from which chocolate is made. "Cocoa" can often also refer to the drink commonly known as hot chocolate; Cocoa solids, the dry powder made by grinding cocoa seeds and removing the cocoa butter from the dark, bitter cocoa solids; or it may refer to the combination of both cocoa p...
, sugar cane, banana

Banana

File:Banana and cross section.jpgBanana is the common name for a fruit and also the herbaceous plants of the genus Musa which produce this commonly eaten fruit....
s, orange

Orange (fruit)

An orange?specifically, the sweet orange?is the citrus Citrus sinensis and its fruit. The orange is a Hybrid of ancient cultivated origin, possibly between pomelo and tangerine ....
s and cotton

Cotton

Cotton is a soft, staple fiber that grows in a form known as a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, India and Africa....
are common cash crops.

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Encyclopedia

In agriculture

Agriculture

Money

Subsistence agriculture

Jute

Jute is a long, soft, shiny vegetable fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. It is produced from plants in the genus Corchorus, family Tiliaceae....
, coffee

Coffee

Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted seeds, commonly called coffee beans, of the Coffea. Caffeinated coffee has a stimulating effect in humans....
, cocoa

Cocoa

Banana

File:Banana and cross section.jpgBanana is the common name for a fruit and also the herbaceous plants of the genus Musa which produce this commonly eaten fruit....
s, orange

Orange (fruit)

Cotton

Cereal

Cereals, or cereal grains, are mostly Poaceae cultivated for their edible brans or fruit seeds . Cereal grains are grown in greater quantities and provide more energy worldwide than any other type of crop; they are therefore staple foods....
crops, oil-yielding crops and some vegetables predominate an example of this is the United States

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
, where corn

Maize

Maize , known as corn in some countries, is a cereal domesticated in Mesoamerica and subsequently spread throughout the American continents....
, wheat

Wheat

Wheat , is a worldwide cultivated Poaceae from the Levant region of the Middle East. Globally, after maize, wheat is the second most-produced food among the cereal just above rice....
, cannabis

Cannabis

Cannabis is a genus of flowering plants that includes three putative species, Cannabis sativa L., Cannabis indica Lam., and Cannabis ruderalis Janisch....
and soybean

Soybean

The soybean or soya bean is a species of legume native to East Asia. The plant is classed as an oilseed rather than a Pulse . It is an annual plant that has been used in China for 5,000 years as a food and a component of drugs....
s are the predominant cash crops. In the 1600s, tobacco

Tobacco

Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the fresh leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as an organic pesticide, and in the form of nicotine tartrate it is used in some medicines....
became a cash crop.

Prices for major cash crops are set in commodity markets

Commodity markets

Commodity markets are markets where raw or primary products are exchanged. These raw commodities are traded on regulated commodities exchanges, in which they are bought and sold in standardized contracts....
with global scope, with some local variation (called basis) based on freight costs and local supply and demand balance. A consequence of this is that a nation, region, or individual producer relying on such a crop may suffer low prices should a bumper crop

Bumper Crop

Bumper Crop is a collection of short fiction by Joe R. Lansdale published in 2004. In his introduction, he cites it as the companion piece to High Cotton, because he had so many stories which didn't quite fit in with the "Best of" but were more like "personal favorites"....
elsewhere lead to excess supply on the global markets. This system is criticized by traditional farmers. Coffee

Coffee

Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted seeds, commonly called coffee beans, of the Coffea. Caffeinated coffee has a stimulating effect in humans....
is a major part of this. Issues involving subsidies and trade barriers on such crops have become controversial in discussions of globalization

Globalization

Globalization in its literal sense is the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together....
. Many developing nations take the position that the current international trade system is unfair because it has caused tariff

Tariff

A tariff is a tax imposed on goods when they are moved across a political boundary. They are usually associated with protectionism, the economic policy of restraining trade between nations....
s to be lowered in industrial goods while allowing for high tariffs and agricultural subsidies for agricultural goods. This makes it difficult for a developing nation to export its goods overseas, and forces developing nations to compete with imported goods which are exported from developed nations at artificially low prices. The practice of exporting at artificially low prices is known as dumping

Dumping

Dumping may refer to:In economics*Dumping , in international trade, the pricing of a product below its cost of production*Social dumping, using transitory labour to save costs...
, and is illegal in most nations. Controversy over this issue led to the collapse of the Cancún

Cancún

Canc?n is a coastal city in Mexico's easternmost state, Quintana Roo, on the Yucat?n Peninsula. Cancun is located on the Yucatan Channel that separates Mexico from the island of Cuba in the Greater Antilles....
trade talks in 2003, when the Group of 22 refused to consider agenda items proposed by the European Union

European Union

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 European Union member state, located primarily in Europe. It was established by the Treaty of Maastricht on 1 November 1993 upon the foundations of the pre-existing European Economic Community....
unless the issue of agricultural subsidies were addressed.

Agribusiness

Agribusiness

In agriculture, agribusiness is a generic term that refers to the various businesses involved in food production, including farming and contract farming, seed supply, agrichemicals, agricultural machinery, wholesale and distribution, processed food, marketing, and retail sales....
, with its high-capital

Infrastructural capital

Infrastructural capital refers to any physical means of production or means of protection beyond that which can be gathered or found directly in nature, i.e....
-investment and industrial-scale agricultural practices, very often skews production towards cash crops and away from anything that is consumed locally or which cannot be preserved, shipped and sold abroad. When used in conjunction with practices which seek to maximize crop yield

Crop yield

In agriculture, crop yield is not only a measure of the yield of cereal per unit area of land under tillage, it is also the seed generation of the plant itself, i.e....
and which favor monoculture

Monoculture

Monoculture is the agricultural practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area. The term is also applied in several fields. It is usually developed by extensive growing farmers....
, increasing reliance on cash crops is seen by some to have adverse, long term environmental consequences. The prevalence of cash crops also makes ethical consumerism difficult, as production practices cannot easily be determined and removed.