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Today, Sweden has over eight million inhabitants. We are a small population residing on a huge territory of land. In comparison to the rest of Europe, Sweden has plenty of space per inhabitant. It doesn't always seem this way because most of us now live in urban and suburban areas.
We certainly do not starve. Sweden today is a highly industrialized country, an industrialized nation as it is currently called. An industrialized nation has a modernized agricultural infrastructure. That is, a farming industry which is not labor intensive but nonetheless feeds millions. What we do not produce ourselves, we import. Sweden is an industrialized nation which has been able to provide for its population for a long time. In many ways, a hundred years ago Sweden was an underdeveloped country. A nation where a majority of the inhabitants were farmers who were required to work long and hard though the fruit of their labor was not always sufficient. Sweden could be characterized as an inequitable society with an enormous gap between the wealthy and the poor. Those who were poor in Sweden at that time lived literally hand to mouth. Men, women, and children lived so close to the starvation point that it is nearly impossible for those in modern Sweden to conceive of it.
The population of Sweden in 1808 was over two and a half million. In 1900 the population was a little over five million. Four out of five inhabitants lived in the countryside, and a predominant majority worked in the agricultural sector. And far too many were threatened by starvation year in and year out.
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