ИСТИНА

During past century typology and regionalization of world agriculture were considered important topics of geographical research. In XXI century modern changes in territorial organization of agriculture along with new opportunities of data collecting and processing recall the relevance of regional approach in agricultural geography. Agricultural development, driven by market economy, enables formation of regions, specialized on production of main food and other (fibers, oils) commodities for international and domestic markets. Basing on FAO statistics and cartographical data, we have defined on the world map 94 specialized agricultural regions. Some of these regions, mostly in developed countries, are stable; their specialization and boundaries do not suffer significant changes. In countries with growing markets regional structure of agriculture changes fast (e.g. recent ‘soybean boom’ regions in Brazil, Argentina and neighbor countries; grains producing regions of Russia). These changes depend on profitability of agriculture, especially in marginal parts of regions, and reflect fluctuations of prices for produced and imported commodities (variable costs). Moreover, in different parts of the world remain many agricultural regions of another kind. We refer to the regions with predominance of subsistence or low market value small-scale agriculture. The stability of these regions (e.g. Andean highlands, lowlands of South Asia) is explained by high degree of survival ability of peasant economy. Market economy impact there is low, being main driving force for changes demography, which influences saturation of the land carrying capacity. Both kind of regions create different networks, which interaction sometimes produces conflicts.