The Rural Voice, 1997-11, Page 28r° M 1 •
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BUILDING A
RURAL
RENAISSANCE
Wendell Berry prescribes a local
solution to building a brighter future
for rural communities
Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer
and one of North America's foremost
thinkers and writers about the
problems facing rural areas, was a
keynote speaker at the "Comparing
Swine Production Systems – What is
the Future?" conference in
Shakespeare, August 27. Repeating a
speech the Port Royal, Kentucky
farmer had delivered previously for
the Community Farm Alliance in the
U.S., he provoked thoughts about the
state of the rural community.
Following is the text of that speech.
By Wendell Berry
By now, it is altogether too easy
to diagram the modern story of
a rural community. We know
the invariable downward steps
of that story:
• Loss of net income to farmers in
the ever -tightening strain between
increasing costs and decreasing
prices.
• Loss of jobs as a result of the
continuing industrialization of
agriculture — which is both a cause
and an effect of the loss of
population.
• Loss of self-respect among
farmers as their incomes decline, and
as they see themselves less and less
respected by the people whom they
have provided with allegedly "cheap"
food.
24 THE RURAL VOICE
• Loss of farms.
• Loss of dealerships, repair shops,
and stores.
• Loss of local schools, churches,
and other community institutions.
• Loss of political representation.
• Loss of doctors and other
professionals.
• Loss of the subsistence econ-
omies, which kept the country people
going through earlier hard times.
This is the history of rural
communities not just in the United
States, but all over the world, and it
has been going on for half a century.
The rural people who remain in
the rural communities and economies
are always travelling farther and
paying more for essential goods and
services. Some of these goods and
services once were provided by their
own farms, families and communities
as a matter of course and at no
monetary cost. The country
communities are thus always more
vulnerable to the economic shifts and
trends that are never in their favour.
And those of us who have observed
closely the life of a rural community
know that there comes a point in this
history of loss and decline when the
community begins to choose against
its own best interest — against itself.
Starting perhaps in small ways, a
small purchase here and there, people
begin to prefer to do business away
from home. They choose Kroger (a
U.S. grocery chain) over the local
grocery, and Rite Aid (a U.S.
pharmacy chain) over the local
drugstore, and Walmart over a whole
set of local shops. And in doing so
they choose, ultimately, against
themselves. I remember speaking
with the owner of a small
independent drugstore who told me
that he had seen his customers
drifting away to the chain stores, but
he said they remained his faithful
customers when they needed
medicine late at night. That is to say
that they were members of "the
market economy" when they were
looking for a bargain, but they
returned to membership in the local
community when they needed a
neighbour — a fickleness that
obviously cannot be kept up
indefinitely. For farmers, likewise,
the stretch is always longer and
tighter between the corporate
economy and the local community
and their own local work.
Thus far, I know, my remarks are
apt 'to be dismissed as mere
sentimentality or nostalgia, a doomed
and hopeless protest against
inevitable change. And so here 1 must
interject a pair of questions that
agricultural economists and other
hard-headed realists are inclined to
overlook: