However, a broad array of scholarship exists, stating that market economies are rapidly increasing in importance on a global scale, even in societies that have traditionally relied much more heavily on subsistence production.
Though periodic movement precludes absolute permanent ownership of land, some horticultural societies fiercely defend current territories and practice violence against neighboring groups.
If practiced on a small scale, over a large area, with long fallow periods, horticulture has less negative environmental impact than agriculture or industrialism, but more than foraging (Miller 2005).
Frequent movement often means that pastoralism has a similar environmental impact to horticulture, though instances of overgrazing, and consequent land degradation (see later subsection under Globalization and Nutrition), have been sited in some cases.
Traditionally, pastoralism has coincided with a subsistence based economy, but in the last several decades, some pastoralist societies, such as Mongolia, have herded animals and practiced nomadic living patterns but have produced livestock primarily for market exchange.
With the exception of Soviet model states, industrial societies are heavily based on the concept of private property rights and the accumulation of profit through “free enterprise”.
These events, far from occurring coincidentally, have had synergistic relationships, in one vivid example, the decimation of Amerindian populations through infectious disease often preceding and facilitating subsequent conquest by European powers.
Such conquests in turn have often had significantly negative impacts on internal cohesion, ability of populations to attain adequate resources for their own subsistence and traditional social obligations, and local environments for colonized societies.
This circumstance began to change when the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, setting in motion a process that would disrupt many societies and devastate indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere.
In dealing with imperialism, capitalism, and the rise of corporations, Robins further details the manner in which the “West” transformed various regions/peoples from proactive participants on global trade networks into sources of raw materials and consumers of European or North American exports.
This free market ideology is also predominant in the policies and procedures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and many transnational corporations (TNC's), most of which are headquartered in developed nations.
Though some objects, such as armbands or shell necklaces in the kula ring that runs through several island groups off the coast of Papua New Guinea, might induce some form of prestige based competition, the terms of exchange are significantly different from a monetary transaction under a modern capitalist system.
Whatever the theoretical stance of social scholars on non-western traditional economies, there is a consensus that such essentials as food and water tended to be shared more freely than other types of goods or services.
This dynamic tends to change with the introduction of a market-based economy into a society, with food coming to be increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than a social good or an essential component of health and survival.
Whether the growth of food insecurity and socioeconomic disparities in many parts of the world in recent decades is an inherent part of globalization or a temporary “growing pain” until economic development attains its full efficacy is a matter of debate, but there are many empirical examples of communities being dissociated from traditional means of food production and not being able to find sufficient wages in a new market economy to achieve a balanced and calorically sufficient diet.
Several factors affecting food security and nutritional status range on a continuum from more physical phenomena such as land degradation and land expropriation, to more culturally and socio-politically driven things such as cash cropping, dietary delocalization, and commoditization of food; one important caveat is that all of these trends are interconnected and fall under a broad category of socio-cultural and economic disruptions and dislocations under the current paradigm of globalization.
Paul Farmer discusses the effects of land degradation in central Haiti on local people's ability to produce sufficient food for their families within the environs of their own communities.
Leatherman and Goodman also allude to land degradation co-occurring with decreases in food security and nutritional status in some communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
Walter Edgar discusses the correlation between land degradation and economic disruption, as well as nutritional hardship, in the U.S. state of South Carolina in the decades following the Reconstruction Period.
In one Example, Donald MacLeod details curtailment of subsistence activities, mainly fishing and cultivation, in areas of the Canary Islands in the face of pressures from tourism interests wishing to monopolize the “pristine” beauty of locations catering to Germans and other tourists from EU nations.
In Sweetness and Power, written by Sidney Mintz in 1985, details examples of mono-cropping, or planting massive areas with one cash crop, in several Caribbean Islands, including Cuba.
He states that Cuba went from being an economically diverse place with many small scale subsistence producers to a mono-crop plantation system dependent on cash from its sugar crop and substantial food imports for the later centuries of the Spanish Colonial Period.
This article treats a common situation of households prioritizing working males in food allocation, exposing growing children to malnutrition, particularly under nutrition and micronutrient deficiency, and all of its attendant ills.
The main import of these examples is not that delocalization is universally negative, but that it tends to increase disparities of food security and nutritional status within and between social groups, with some segments suffering marked degradation of both.
[6][7] The deleterious effects of mild to moderate malnutrition (MMM) not only pertain to caloric insufficiency (often closely associated with food insecurity) but also to poor dietary diversity; in particular, curtailed access to protein, complex carbohydrates, zinc, iron, and other micronutrients.
[14]Though longer birth spacing can help control population growth, the evidence that Chavez et al.[12] present suggest a curtailing of reproductive choice and adaptability due to malnutrition.
Allen[16] found a correlation between reduced VO2 max rates among MMM populations and decreased muscular strength and endurance in the performance of strenuous manual labor.
One cultural variation in this trend was found among MMM Guatemalan workers who put forth work effort comparable to better nourished counterparts, but were likely to engage in resting behavior than in recreational or social activity during off hours.
[18] Aside from MMM due to under-nutrition or micro-nutrient deficiency, over-nutrition, defined as the consumption of too many calories for one's body size and physical activity level,[19] is also becoming an increasingly significant problem for much of the World.
Overnutrition is also often associated with the co-occurrence of caloric sufficiency (or over-sufficiency) and micronutrient deficiency, as is often the case where processed foods that are high in calories, but low in most nutrients, increase in dietary prominence.