The wealthy of Ming China delighted in beauty – cloudlike silk gauzes, translucent porcelains, ornate lacquerwork, gorgeous filigree – while famine periodically reduced subsistence farmers to eating earth and each other.
With economic modernization, food choices in AS have changed from traditional plant-based and fish-based diets to greater reliance on imported and highly processed foods and fast foods, which combined with reduced subsistence activities and low physical activity levels increase noncommunicable diseases risks (2, 10).
The rural population was reduced to subsistence levels, bartering with cattle and bags of paddy.
Zimbabweans have been reduced to subsistence (some survive on roots and berries), barter, and remittances and handouts from abroad.
Then, there are the post-apocalyptic scenarios in which humanity is reduced to subsistence farming or neo-feudalism, stuck in villages ruled by religious fanatics or surrounded by toxic wastelands, predatory warlords, or flesh-eating zombie hordes.
Without copra, outer islanders will be reduced to a subsistence survival, eked from the land, supplemented by fishing and likely made impossible by tidal inundations.
With no easily accessible outlet to fence their stolen goods, pirates were reduced to a subsistence livelihood, and following almost a century of naval warfare between the British, French and Spanish during which sailors could find easy employment lone privateers found themselves outnumbered by the powerful ships employed by the British Empire to defend its merchant fleets.
Madagascar's economy quickly deteriorated as exports fell, industrial production dropped by 75 percent, inflation spiked and government debt increased; the rural population was soon reduced to living at subsistence levels.
I was amazed at how much of it remained operational after two years of occupation, but JoJo said he'd been reduced to little more than subsistence farming.
At the mercy of pillagers, reduced to eking out a subsistence living in a small Irish town, the character lives in a hell of scarce resources, little communication, less travel, and haunting hopelessness.
Still, Lindsey believes that the new dimension of liberty — emancipation from the preoccupation with subsistence — has been a boon because material security has reduced "stress".
