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in The Guardian newspaper claiming that rural people were a distinctive culture, as
threatened as any indigenous tribe in the rainforest (Woods, 2003a).
Such warnings convey a sense of urgency, but is contemporary rural change really
anything new? In April 2000, 250 rural leaders gathered in Kansas City to [p. 30
] discuss the policy challenges facing rural America. As one participant told the
conference: At the dawn of the 21st century rural America faces unprecedented
change, yet he then continued: for at least the last half century many rural communities
have been on a demographic and economic roller coaster (Johnson, 2000, p. 7). A
historian would have probably stretched the timescale even further. The point being
made is that the problem with much of the contemporary rhetoric about rural change
is that it suggests a false dichotomy between a dynamic and threatening rural present
and a stable, romanticized rural past. More accurately, the rural can be recognized as
a continuous space of change sometimes on a far greater and more disruptive scale
than that experienced today. Are the changes experienced in recent decades by rural
regions of North America, Australia and New Zealand really more significant that those
that followed the arrival of European settlers from the sixteenth century onwards? Is
contemporary rural change in Europe really as extensive as that experienced during
the first agricultural revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or during the
great period of industrialization and urbanization at the turn of the twentieth century?
This chapter examines these characteristics in more detail, seeking to identify some of
the key processes of change and to illustrate some of the consequences, highlighting
themes that will be developed further in later chapters. Drawing together the effects of
modernity and globalization, the conclusion argues that it is the cumulative impacts of
the processes operating under these short-hand concepts that enable us to talk about
rural restructuring.
The list of technological innovations that have changed aspects of rural social and
economic life is extensive, but three examples can be flagged up here as illustrations.
First, consider refrigeration. The development of refrigeration technologies, both
for commercial storage and for domestic use, has had a revolutionary impact on
our relationship to food in the developed world. Food can now be transported vast
distances from the site of production to the site of consumption, and no longer needs
to be consumed in season. Refrigeration created new food-processing industries and
corporations, and enabled the development of supermarkets. These developments
in turn helped to make agriculture into a global trade, encouraged specialization by
farmers and strengthened the power of the food-processing and retail companies
against that of the farmers. At a domestic level, refrigeration changed the shopping
habits of rural consumers, reducing their dependence on local suppliers and allowing
more irregular shopping trips to supermarkets in towns, thus contributing to the closure
of rural shops and services.
Similarly, the development of motor vehicles has changed practices of both production
and consumption in the countryside. Commercial farm vehicles, such as tractors and
combine harvesters, changed the nature of farming and reduced the demand for farm
labour, contributing to the decline of agriculture as a source of employment in rural
areas. The growth of private car ownership, meanwhile, increased the mobility of rural
people and loosened ties to rural communities. Commuting became possible, prompting
counterurbanization and breaking the link between residence and employment. Mass
tourism, too, was facilitated, rejuvenating the economies of some rural regions but also
bringing environmental consequences.
Moreover, the impact of modernization on rural areas has not been restricted to
technological innovation. Social change too has had an effect, with similar trends
operating in rural societies as in urban societies. The decline of organized religion (more
pronounced in Europe, Australia and New Zealand than in [p. 32 ] the United States),
for example, has eroded the prominence and power of churches and chapels as one of
the traditional tenets of rural communities. Mass participation in secondary and higher
education in the developed world has meanwhile altered the life courses of rural young
people, taking many out of their communities to colleges and universities and restricting
their opportunity to return due to a shortage of graduate-level jobs.
Collectively these processes match lay understandings of the term modernization, but
they also constitute a transformation in rural societies that reflects a more philosophical
conceptualization of modernity. This holds that one of the fundamental features
of modernity is the separation of the natural and the human. Modernization has
arguably engineered this separation in rural society by reducing employment in those
occupations that involve direct contact with the natural world (for example, agriculture,
forestry); by introducing technologies into farming that are designed to intervene
between the human worker and nature, or to manipulate or resist nature; by developing
technologies to overcome the vulnerability of rural societies to natural phenomena,
such as difficult terrain or harsh weather; and by diminishing the cultural connection
of rural people with nature through, for example, festivals celebrating seasons of the
year. Modern agriculture and food marketing distances food consumers from the place
and process of production (such that surveys frequently show that children have little
knowledge of where their food comes from), and nature itself has become packaged
and delimited in the countryside in nature reserves and national parks.
As the twentieth century drew to a close it was suggested that we were moving from
the era of modernity into a condition of postmodernity, in which the order, structure and
normative ideals of modernity would be dissolved into a world characterized more by
flux, fluidity and multiplicity. Postmodernity does not suggest any reversal of (or even an
end to) the physical modernization of rural space described above, but it does suggest
a change in the attitude and perceptions of those who live in and shape rural space,
and of the academics who attempt to research it. The postmodern rural is less precisely
defined and delimited than modern countryside the blurring of the rural and the urban
is recognized, as is the existence of many different rurals occupying the same space
but socially constructed differently by people from different standpoints (see Chapter 1).
The postmodern countryside is perhaps expressed too in the rejection of some of the
idealistic orthodoxies of modernization, including growing scepticism towards science in
the wake of food-related disease scares and resistance towards GM agriculture, as well
as attempts by colonizers seeking to get back to nature to deconstruct the modernist
separation of the natural and the human. These issues will be picked up again in later
chapters (see Chapters 4, 15 and 21).
[p. 33 ]
Globalization is therefore, in essence, about power about the lack of power of rural
regions to control their own futures, and about the increasing subjection of rural regions
to networks and processes of power that are produced, reproduced and executed on
a global scale. The power of global capitalism, and, by extension, global corporations,
is one clear example of this and is as significant in traditional rural economic sectors
such as agriculture as in any industry. But globalization is about more than just trade or
corporate ownership. Indeed, Pieterse (1996) argues that globalization should not be
seen as a monolith, but that there are many globalizations, sometimes contradictory,
always fluid and often open-ended. As Gray and Lawrence (2001) demonstrate in
an examination of rural Australia in the context of globalization, Pieterse's argument
This section discusses three forms of globalization that have a particular relevance for
contemporary rural societies economic globalization, the globalization of mobility and
the globalization of values and explores their roles in driving rural change and the
consequences for rural societies.
Economic Globalization
The term global economy most likely conjures up an image of Manhattan skyscrapers
or the trading floor of a stock exchange. Yet, the most immediate contact with the
global economy that most of us have on a regular basis is in the aisles of our local
supermarket. There on the shelves are row after row of food products that have been
sourced from all over the world, processed and sold by global corporations, aimed
at a global market and often promoted through a multinational advertising campaign.
As Table 3.1 shows, the food that you eat in a single meal is likely to have travelled
further than you will in a whole year. The location of the supermarket will make little
difference; all of the products listed in Table 3.1 for Iowa are grown in the state itself, yet
supermarkets buying from agri-food corporations or through large wholesale markets
(Figure 3.1), will go for the cheapest, best-selling or most convenient option, wherever
sourced. Even if local produce is sold, it may have come via a circuitous route. An
investigation for British television found that beef from cattle reared in South Wales
was transported nearly 500 miles to the slaughterhouse, processing and packaging
plant and distribution centre before being sold in a supermarket close to the initial farm
(Guardian, 10 May 2003).
Table 3.1 Approximate food miles travelled by typical food products from source to
place of consumption in Iowa and London
Figure 3.1 Rungis wholesale market, Paris. Centres like this are the major nodes in the
global agricultural economy
with exports accounting for 30 per cent of world production of sawnwood, 30 per cent of
wood-based panels and 7 per cent of industrial roundwood (Bruinsma, 2003).
Table 3.2 World exports of selected livestock produce as a percentage of total world
consumption
Adaptation to the new global economy has resulted in a number of significant changes
to the practice of agriculture in the developed world, with knock-on effects for the wider
rural community. Farms have become more specialized as the need to provide a range
of produce to local markets has evaporated and greater profitability can be achieved by
maximizing sales of single products to food processing companies and supermarkets;
the ties between farmers and local rural communities have been weakened as the sales
transaction has disappeared; and agriculture has become more vulnerable to global
economic factors (Figure 3.2). When British agriculture slumped into depression in the
late 1990s, including one year when average farm income fell by 46 per cent, the crisis
was precipitated by the strength of sterling reducing income from exports compounding
the effects of an earlier ban on the export of British beef imposed by the European
Union due to an epidemic of BSE (mad cow disease).
Figure 3.2 The McFarmer burger advertised by this fast food outlet in Switzerland hints
at an attempt to respond to local tastes but ultimately represents the homogenization
and corporatization of food consumption
For more see Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan (2002) Opening spaces through
relocalization: locating potential resistance in the weaknesses of the global food system.
Sociologia Ruralis, 42, 347369.
Korea. Ahold has interests in the Netherlands, Latin America, Portugal, Spain, Poland,
the Czech Republic, Scandinavia and the Far East. The French supermarket chain
Carrefour, meanwhile, is also the largest retailer in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Portugal,
Greece, Belgium and Taiwan (Hendrickson and Heffernan, 2002). Supermarkets have
a twofold influence in rural areas. As large-scale purchasers from farmers and farm
cooperatives, they exercise considerable power over farmgate prices. But as large-
scale retailers, with the capacity to undercut smaller shops, supermarkets have also
been accused of contributing to the closure of independent rural stores and specialist
butchers, bakers and greengrocers in small towns and villages (see Chapter 7).
The third feature of economic globalization to impact on rural areas is the growing
significance of global regulatory frameworks. As rural economies become integrated
into global trade networks, so the capacity of national governments to regulate
the economic life of rural regions is diminished, with power shifted upwards to
bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Agriculture is one of the most
contentious political flashpoints in the negotiations that set the WTO's policies, as
the organization's underlying agenda of trade liberalization (which is supported by
the agri-food conglomerates and by a number of net-agricultural-exporter nations)
clashes with domestic political pressures in Europe and the United States to protect
internal agricultural markets (see Chapter 9 for more). The resolution of this impasse
will reverberate down to the level of individual farms and rural communities, with the
potential that a pro-free-trade outcome would remove the subsidies and price support
mechanisms that have effectively bankrolled agriculture in some peripheral rural regions
for decades (Chapters 4 and 9).
but the movement of people in and out of rural areas today is different insofar as it must
be positioned within this context of heightened global mobility. For example, migration
flows are no longer predominantly uni-directional forces. Many rural areas may be
experiencing net in-migration through counterurbanization, but this tends to disguise
a fluid situation in which there is also significant out-migration, and in which people
may move in and out of rural areas (as well as within rural areas) several times during
the course of their life. One consequence of this is that people have become less tied
to particular places and therefore that the coherence and stability [p. 38 ] that once
characterized rural communities have been eroded. These issues are discussed further
in Chapter 6, whilst further implications for rural housing are considered in Chapter 16.
The majority of migration into rural areas is still of a domestic origin, but there are also
flows of immigration directly into rural regions. Notably, this reflects the mobility of
both the haves and the have-nots under globalization. On the one hand, it includes the
purchase of holiday homes and second homes by wealthy foreigners, as well as more
permanent moves by individuals seeking a new start in life. For example, over 20,000
Britons purchase property in rural France each year (Hoggart and Buller, 1995). On
the other hand, immigration reflects the dependency of many labour-intensive forms of
agriculture on migrant workers, particularly in the United States. An estimated 69 per
cent of all seasonal farm workers in the United States are foreign-born, including more
than 90 per cent of the seasonal workforce in California (Bruinsma, 2003). The majority
have come from Mexico, and as such they are part of a long tradition that extends back
over most of the twentieth century (Mitchell, 1996), and which is a vital component in
the story of American agricultural capitalism. However, as will be discussed further
in Chapter 18, migrant workers have often been subjected to extreme exploitation
and poor pay and working conditions. Moreover, immigration of any form can provoke
ethnic and cultural tensions in rural communities, particularly where the new arrivals
are perceived to threaten nationalistic notions of rurality, or local cultural traditions and
languages. As such, racism is increasingly acknowledged as a problem in many rural
areas (see Chapter 20).
On a more temporary basis, global mobility also encompasses the rise of global
tourism, with some 692 million people taking holidays outside their country of residence
in 2001. Long-haul tourism has played a major role in regenerating rural economies,
with New Zealand in particular acquiring a global reputation as a centre for rural
adventure tourism (see Chapter 12). However, the growth of tourism also brings social
and environmental challenges for rural areas, including demands for structural changes
in their local economies and, like other forms of globalization, involves a loss of power
by rural communities as the way in which their rurality is represented and promoted is
reconfigured to appeal to the preconceptions of international tourists (Cater and Smith,
2003).
Cultural Globalization
A third dimension of globalization is the rise of the global media and emergence
of a global mass culture, founded on the common consumption of the same films,
television, literature, music and so on. In this global culture, much of our perception
of and knowledge about the countryside is derived from films, books and television
programmes in which a stylized representation of rural life is portrayed and in which the
regional distinctions between, for example, a farmyard in England and a farmyard in
Pennsylvania, are ignored. In particular, our knowledge of nature is frequently based on
children's literature, Disney films and natural history programmes all of which tend to
humanize animals rather than on actual interaction with nature in the countryside. The
result, so rural campaigners claim, is that there is lack of understanding of rural life and
rural traditions, leading to conflicts over practices such as hunting and some methods
of farming. [p. 39 ] A promotional article for the pro-hunting British pressure group
the Countryside Alliance, for instance, remarked that a generation brought up on The
Animals of Farthing Wood, Walt Disney films and visits to theme parks is easy meat for
single-issue pressure groups who exploit this lack of understanding of the realities of
the countryside to their own ends (Hanbury-Tenison, 1997, p. 92), whilst a recent book
celebrating hunting in America argued that to attempt to manage nature after such
a kindergarten-cartoonish fashion as Bambi portrays and fosters would soon spell
ecological catastrophe Bambi that monstrously unnatural Hollywood propaganda
beast must die (Petersen, 2000, p. 158).
International War Crimes Tribunal, but also the promotion of global environmental
standards and of animal rights. These latter initiatives are commonly rooted in scientific
and philosophical discourses and may therefore lead to different conclusions from the
lay understandings of nature passed down by rural people. As such, conflicts can arise
as they are put into practice. For example, the Chasse, Pche, Nature et Tradition
(hunting, fishing, nature and tradition) party polled 12 per cent of the vote in the 1999
European Parliamentary elections in France on a platform of opposition to an EU
directive that would reduce the hunting season for migratory birds, which they presented
as part of a wider assault on indigenous rural values.
Resisting Globalization
Globalization is not all-powerful. As noted earlier, it is perhaps more accurate
to think of there being multiple globalizations, some of which are contradictory,
and which present numerous opportunities for resistance and contestation. In the
contemporary countryside, instances of resistance to globalization can be observed
when farmers blockade ports or distribution plants to protest at imports or the prices
paid by supermarkets; when pro-hunting groups rally to protect their sport; and when
environmental campaigners fight oil corporations in rural Alaska or logging companies in
the forests of the Pacific North West (see also Box 3.3).
[p. 40 ]
For more see Jos Bov and Franois Du four (2001) The World Is Not For Sale:
Farmers against Junk Food (Verso); Michael Woods (2004) Politics and protest in the
contemporary countryside, in L. Holloway and M. Kneafsey (eds), Geographies of Rural
Societies and Cultures (Ashgate).
Summary
Rural areas have always been spaces of change, shaped by economic cycles, trade
fluctuations, new technologies, migration flows, political upheavals and environmental
conditions. In the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first however, rural
areas across the developed world have experienced a period of change distinguished
by its intensity, persistence and totality. Driven by the twin forces of technological
and social modernization and globalization, contemporary rural change has affected
all areas of rural life from the domestic routines of rural families to the investment
decisions of global agri-food corporations; from the ownership of rural property to the
management of the rural environment. It is in this way that the countryside can be
described as undergoing restructuring.
Restructuring is a widely used term in contemporary rural studies but its meaning can
be quite loose. In some cases, restructuring is used to imply nothing more than that
change is taking place, whilst in other cases it has a more precise and theoretically
grounded application. Hoggart and Paniagua (2001) contend that the concept has been
devalued through over-use and misapplication and argue for a more careful usage:
[p. 41 ]
This book follows the logic of the above analysis by next exploring how rural
restructuring has been operationalized and expressed through changes in agriculture,
the wider rural economy, the social composition of the rural population, the organization
of rural communities and services, and the management of the rural environment. It
then proceeds to examine the responses to rural restructuring that have been adopted
both by those responsible for governing rural areas and by those living in rural areas,
before finally investigating the experiences of change and the contemporary countryside
of people from all parts of the rural population.
Further Reading
There is relatively little published work that explicitly examines the experience of rural
areas under globalization. The best account, which is written from the perspective of
rural Australia but contains extensive general material on globalization, is Ian Gray
and Geoff Lawrence's A Future for Regional Australia (Cambridge University Press,
2001). For more on the globalization of agriculture, and particularly the role of global
food chain clusters, see Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan, Opening spaces
through relocalization: locating potential resistance in the weaknesses of the global food
system, in Sociologia Ruralis, volume 42, pages 347369 (2002). For more on rural
restructuring and the debates over the application of the concept, see Keith Hoggart
and Angel Paniagua, What rural restructuring?, in Journal of Rural Studies, volume 17,
pages 4162 (2001).
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446216415.n3