Rebuilding Rural Economies
"On the Tohono O´odham Reservation, along the Mexico and Arizona border, tribal members are battling the devastating effects of a diabetes epidemic by restoring the cultivation of traditional drought-resistant crops. New farming operations devoted to traditional foods, such as tepary beans, are developing new jobs, increasing the tribe´s food security and self-sufficiency, and leading to healthier diets."
Healthy Food and Communities: A Decade of Community Food Projects in Action
Tohono O´odham is one project, in one area, to begin rebuilding a rural economy. Renewing agriculture around the US and developing new markets for farmers and ranchers is essential to rural and urban development, since all of us depend on farms for everything we eat. Spurring innovation and job creation is the key to ensuring the long-term future of rural America, which in turn supports the national´s farm economy and food system. Rural development policies must promote entrepreneurship in both the agriculture and non-agriculture sectors and build on individual and community assets.
Rural Challenges
There are special challenges facing rural communities. Rural America comprises over two thousand counties, contains 75% of the nation's land and is home to 17% (49 million) of the US population (USDA Economic Research Service). Workers in rural areas earn less money and experience higher rates of poverty and unemployment. Food insecurity is more common in rural areas and large cities than in other areas of the country. Rural child poverty rates remain higher than the rates for urban children (21% versus 18%), while the same time, the rural elderly face escalating rates of poverty. In 2003, 2.7 million rural children were poor, representing 36 percent of the rural poor. The geographic distribution of child poverty -- heavily concentrated in the South -- is important for targeting poverty-reduction policies.
The Dismantling of Rural Economies
Local and Regional Food Systems, Family Farms, and Community Food Assessment provide examples of particular communities, at a particular place and time, taking steps to rebuild rural economies. But why is there so desperate a need? What has happened to rural economies?
Rural economies in the U.S. need to be rebuilt because they are being systemically dismantled by outside forces. Ken Meter of Crossroads Resource Center has analyzed the "structural rural poverty" which is creating the growth of a third world within the US. Rural communities are beleaguered in the US as their counterparts are elsewhere in the world, and inner-city communities are in similar situations. A burgeoning metropolitan economy, whether it is in New York, London, or Tokyo, creates zones of development from which it can extract wealth by preying on rural economies.
Meter writes, "So much wealth is drained away from rural communities that they are greatly hampered in creating self-help efforts, and no one from the outside world has much of a reason to overturn the extractive systems since they gain financial benefits from them. Many of the communities I work with have a clear analysis that poverty is structural."
Meter's studies entitled Finding Food in Farm Country document the workings of an extractive economy on a state and national level. Findings cover the growing debt of US farmers to external bankers; the dependency of farmers on expensive farm inputs -- seeds, fertilizers, chemicals, etc. -- from outside their region; farmers producing crops that are raw materials for industry, and not directly edible; consumers buying food mainly from external sources, even as their neighbors lose money producing food commodities. In Meter´s findings, farm subsidies "benefit lenders, agriculture supply industries, grain traders, food manufacturers, lenders, land prices, and a host of other parties more than they benefit farmers." Farmers have become dependent on distant suppliers and larger distribution infrastructure, and corporate agribusiness has taken most of the profit from farmer productivity.
Dwindling Local Control
The Way Forward: Building Rural Capacities
Innovative organizations -- both nationally and at the grassroots -- have developed programs and resources to serve the special needs of rural communities. Government programs and studies have also sought to increase assistance and access to emergency food. Additionally, there is a growing revival of community-based family farming and local systems to grow, process, and market food. Urban agriculture, farmers´ markets, CSAs serving low-income communities, institutional buying of local food, added-value products, organic agriculture, Native American reservations restoring indigenous food systems and local economies -- initiatives like these are flourishing around the country. The movements for community food security (largely focused on urban and consumer concerns) and sustainable agriculture (focused more on rural and producer concerns) are connecting and building capacities to respond to both rural and urban poverty. These alliances seek not only to combat rural food insecurity, but to rebuild rural economic strength and power.Sources:
- Personal communication from Ken Meter. This introduction draws heavily on his writing and research.
- Policy Options for a Changing Rural America “ Amber Waves May 2007 Special Issue.
- Rural Children At A Glance, USDA ERS Economic Information Bulletin Number 1, March 2005.
- Seeking Balance in U.S. Farm and Food Policy, January 2007.
updated 6/2009
