Rural Poverty

Few issues touch me as much as rural poverty.  Because most of us live in cities, and because rural poverty looks quite different than urban poverty, it is hard for us to see it. When we do see it, it’s hard to empathize with it because many don’t quite understand it.  It’s a much more hidden, but trapping kind of poverty, and it infects our countryside “from sea to shining sea.” 

I grew up in Hamel, MN, which is now pretty much absorbed into the Minneapolis suburbs.  But when I was little it was a thriving small community, full of family histories and loads of stories.  As a kid, I could not really do much wrong, because it was instantly reported to my parents.  I knew everyone: the good, the bad, the lonely, the happy.  I could wander pretty much freely, knowing who to trust and who to stay away from.  Surrounded by forests, swamps, creeks, and farm fields, I grew up appreciating nature: both it’s beauty and its power. 

The community was a tight knit community.  Everyone seemed to have a role (even the town drunks) and most would step in to help those in need.  We had a few local businesses, including a hardware store (closed now after almost 100 years) and a bank, as well as a post office, a Catholic church, a fire department, and (as all small towns in Minnesota have) a bar.  We had a very active Lions Club, legion, VFW, and snowmobile club.  Everyone had their craft, and everyone had some sort of volunteer/social activity in which they participated.  Farmers were aplenty too, and they had respect for the land, and for the food they produced. 

This is the way small towns used to be.  They had their farmers and local craftsmen and small businesses, each supporting the other.  They were close knit places, with enough work to go around.  Granted, life was often hard, but the people in the community had each other to fall back on, and to prop each other up. 

But things changed.  Due to places like WalMart and Home Depot, the local hardware stores and shops began to close down.  They couldn’t compete, and began to fold.  The factory farms came in too -- massive feedlots and mechanized food production, smelling and polluting not like a farm, but like a toxic dump.  They showed nothing but disrespect for the food system, treating vegetables, grains, animals alike as only commodities, not sources of nourishment.  The family farms couldn’t compete, and those without subsidies began to fold or combined together to form more factory farms. 

With the loss of the small businesses and the family farms, rural folk now have few sources of employment.  They had to take the low paying, minimal benefit jobs offered by the new big boys in town.  Commuting to the city is often not a option, unless they move (which many did and continue to do), so the choices are very limited.  And if the one major employer closes or moves, large swaths of a town can be out of work, with little or no options.

If we detour off of the freeway and drive through our towns, we can see the effect.  Abandoned buildings and farm houses, overweight people living off of the poor nourishment that food stamps offer.  But what we don’t see can also be striking: multiple families living in one place, underfunded schools with minimal resources, huge gas costs for long commutes, and the breakdown of the community.

That’s right, the heart of America, where many of us can trace our ancestries, the rural community, is breaking down.  Now days, it is easy to live in a small town and hardly know anyone.  Many community groups are no longer functioning, or function barely with a fraction of the membership they had before.  The communities, and the support that goes along with them, are breaking down.  And along with the communities goes the family farm, and with it our respect, understanding, and reverence for the food we put into our bodies.

Unless we begin to work hard, we will lose the backbone of America, and these people will have to chose between toiling in poverty, or moving away.  Either option destroys our small towns.  But there is hope.

While researching this issue I came across the Horizons Project, created by the Northwest Area Foundation and operating as extension projects at universities across several northern central and western states.  The projects work with rural towns to build their sense of community, showing them how to identify their needs, build their visions, and take action for their communities.  It uses the power of the community itself to combat poverty.

Their is also a movement about called Food Sovereignty, which promotes the right of peoples to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems, in contrast to having food largely subject to market forces.  Food Sovereignty operates on seven key principles:

1) Food is a basic human right
2) Agrarian reform that gives people control and ownership of the land they farm
3) Protection of Natural Resources
4) Reorganizing food trade, treating food as a source of nutrition over a commodity
5) Ending the globalization of hunger
6) Social Peace
7) Democratic Control

Such a movement could pull the control of food from commodity exchanges and factory farms, and put it back into the hands of the people.

We can support our rural communities by buying local.  Supporting local small businesses and cooperatives means supporting your community, supporting local crafts, supporting local food, and supporting a positive way of life.  We can also make sure to shop at farmers markets, from where we can eat healthy and support local farmers.  USDA has a great program called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,” which seeks to reconnect producers and consumers of food, so we may support local communities and gain a better respect for the food we eat.

Of course there’s a host of legislative and enforcement cations that need to happen, such as funneling more Federal and state money into our rural communities, protecting workers rights and preventing abuses at industrial operations everywhere, including our towns, reforming our farm subsidies programs so they support family farms and not factor farms (as well as healthy eating), and true agrarian reform.  Of course each one of these is a whole topic in itself, so I will cover them later in time.

There is hope to combat rural poverty, and through the power of community, changing our views on food, and buying local, we can do something about it.

Other links of interest
USDA Rural Development
Family Farm Defenders
National Family Farm Coalition
Blog on Rural Poverty
USDA on Rural Poverty