The challenge of rural poverty in the "Least Developed Countries" (LDCs)

"World's Poorest Nations Battle Rising Rural Poverty" is the headline for this November story by Thalif Deen for Interpress News Service, which just came to my attention.  Here are the first few paragraphs:  

The world’s 48 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor, are fighting a relentless battle against rising rural poverty.

More than two thirds of the population of LDCs live in rural areas, and 60 per cent work in agriculture. 

As a result, there is an urgent need for structural changes focused on the fight against poverty, says a new report released November 25 by the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 

“This means developing the synergies between agricultural modernisation and diversification of the rural economy.” 

Currently, the total population of the 48 LDCs is estimated at over 932 million people.
UNCTAD’s Least Developed Countries Report 2015, subtitled “Transforming Rural Economies”, presents a road map to address rural poverty, lack of progress in rural transformation and the root causes of migration within and from LDCs. 

The migration of poor people from the countryside into cities fuels excessive rates of urbanisation in many of the 48 LDCs, while many international migrants come from rural areas, says the report.

My own writing about rural women, migration and development is here, here and here.  

How important are rural voters in the Iowa caucuses?

This story in today's New York Times suggests rural voters in Iowa really matter.   "Rural Voters can Swing the Iowa Caucuses.  Meet Five of Them" is the headline.  Here's the lede:

There is a surprising diversity in the physical as well as the political landscape of Iowa’s rural areas, which make up more than three-quarters of the state’s 99 counties and are home to 40 percent of its population.

It’s not all flat farmland. The “driftless area” in the northeastern part of the state, which avoided advancing glaciers thousands of years ago, boasts deep river valleys and towering, tree-covered bluffs.

And it’s not all conservative.

There is a lot of texture to this story, and it is well worth a read in its entirety (some great photos, too!)  Here are some key quotes that shed light on the realities of rurality in relation to the political process (and otherwise):

And rural Iowans, who may caucus with just a handful of their neighbors on Feb. 1, take their responsibility just as seriously.

Rural Iowans can swing the state. 

In the 2012 Republican race, half of Iowa’s counties had fewer than 600 voters caucus, with some caucus sites hosting as few as three people. 

And it was the margins in those counties’ tiny precincts that ultimately delivered the victory to Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney.

* * * 

Party leaders in rural areas are well aware of the power they hold, whether they vote as a bloc to tip the result in one direction or provide just enough support to cut into a candidate’s margins from the bigger cities.

* * * 

Caucusing, especially in rural areas, requires a higher level of commitment.  

And a few more great blurbs and headlines about the relevance of rurality to the Iowa caucuses and to the political process more generally:

Rural politics are uniquely personal.

Party leaders will tell you that political organizing in rural areas isn’t the same as in the cities. It’s a much more personal experience to share your political beliefs with the people you see at the grocery store or at church every week. 

The caucuses themselves are not designed for anonymity.

And here is a quote from 30-year-old Ryan Frederick, chairman of the Adair County Republicans:

I think as far as farmers are concerned and rural small-business people, we’re tuned in to an extent because we know how involved the government’s become in our business. It’s important to recognize that regulations almost always hurt the little guy. And in rural areas, that’s all there is, is little guys.

Whether rural voters matter not just in Iowa, but over the long haul of the presidential election, remains to be seen.  I'm not convinced that they do ...  though I do agree that not all rural Americans are conservative and we need to stop assuming they are.  For more on the politics of the rural vote and national assumptions about it, don't miss my 2011 law review article here.

Photo essay on "Faith, Family and the American Farmer" in the Atlantic:

Here is Emily Ann Epstein's introduction to Elliot Ross's photo essay:  

For the past year, Elliot Ross has been photographing the world of farmer Jim Mertens. Inspired by the empathetic imagery of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, Ross created an essay that examines the relationship between the farmer and the land, giving both characters equal focus in “The Reckoning Days.” The grains of wheat and the cracked palms of laborers are given the same attention, depicted in a mesmerizing palette of blues and yellows. This is how bread, the most basic staple of our diet, is made. “Society is generally removed from the processes in which bread and hundreds of other products reach our baskets,” Ross said. "We must protect, nurture, and celebrate the salt of the earth.”

Don't miss these gorgeous photos which, for me, were very moving, poignant.    

Income inequality--ski resort style

The New York Times reports today on how workers in ski resorts in Colorado cannot afford to live there.  This is, of course, not really "news" (as we have addressed it here and here), but Jack Healy suggests the problem has gotten worse recently.  It's not just a function of rural gentrification--but of the widening inequality gap in our nation.  Here's an excerpt.

These days, soaring home prices and a shift toward weekend vacation rentals have created a housing crisis in ski country, one that has people piling into apartments, camping in the woods and living out of their trailers and pickup trucks.

* * *  

Some are sleeping in their bosses’ spare bedrooms. The 2,300-person town of Telluride in southwest Colorado toyed with building tiny houses as a stop gap. In Steamboat Springs, Colo., where the vacancy rate for multifamily rental units was zero at the end of last year, bus drivers and hotel housekeepers have been living out of two motels converted to de facto dormitories.

The story quotes the mayor of Jackson Hole, where the median price of a single family home rose to $1.2 million last year, up nearly 25%.

When I go to the grocery store, I see the people who are sleeping in shifts. We see the gap continuing to widen between the uppermost levels of income earners and the rest.

While many ski towns have long built affordable housing, officials now indicate that the demand far exceeds the supply.  Breckenridge, county seat of Summit County, is now building 45 small apartments, with hundreds more in development.  The county is also checking to ensure that that those getting the benefit of employee housing are not subletting to "vacationing snowbirds."  Elisabeth Lawrence of the Breckenridge Town Council explains:

It’s so important that Breckenridge retain this identity of having locals live here.  ... Real town, real people.

Great idea.  Sounds like Breckenridge is doing more than most to keep things "real."

Our "empty" country

The Washington Post's Wonkblog published yesterday this piece on "the jaw-dropping emptiness of America." Christopher Ingraham presents a map depicting the 462 least populated counts in the country, none of which has a population density greater than 7.4 persons per square mile.  And in 65 counties the density is less than one person per square mile.  He then notes that all of the folks who live in these 462 counties add up to fewer than New York's Bronx and Queens Counties, a fact depicted in another map.  Worth a look.  Anyway, Ingraham closes with these lines:

Geographically speaking, we are a nation of mountains, forests and farmland surrounding tiny islands of urbanity. These maps help put some of that in perspective.

Fair enough, but as the U.S. Supreme Court has said regarding politics and representation, our members of congress represent people, not trees and cows.  Hence the interests of rural America remains quite underrepresented--at least in my opinion--in spite of the fact that states like Montana and Wyoming each have two U.S. Senators (and just one member of Congress).

Heroin and opioid overdoses on the rise everywhere, but especially in rural places

Haeyoun Park and Matthew Bloch reported yesterday in the New York Times on the rise in drug overdoses in the United States, mapping the overdoses per capita at the county level for each year from 2003 up through 2014.  Among other facts, they note:

Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest, according to new county-level estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The number of these deaths reached a new peak in 2014: 47,055 people, or the equivalent of about 125 Americans every day. 

* * * 

Drug overdoses cut across rural-urban boundaries. In fact, death rates from overdoses in rural areas now outpace the rate in large metropolitan areas, which historically had higher rates.

Sadly, I see that the death rate in my home county, Newton County, Arkansas, is in the highest range, 20 per 100,000, up from much lower levels in 2003. 

New Hampshire, Appalachia, and New Mexico are three states/regions that receive particular attention in the story, New Hampshire because the drug epidemic there has become a top campaign issue.  A 2008 story about heroin and opioid addiction, across multiple generations within New Mexico families, is here.  A 2011 blog post about Oxycontin addiction in Appalachia is here.   

Rural economies tanking across the nation ... from Maine to Oregon, Kentucky to Wyoming

I've written about the situations in Wyoming and Kentucky here, both linked to lack of demand for and government regulation of coal production and burning.  But regulation and slowing of other extraction industry economies are also to blame in Oregon and Maine.  Of course, the Oregon situation has been very high profile for a few weeks now (read more here and here), and the New York Times ran this story about Maine a few days ago.  But I want to revisit in more detail what is being reported in these latter two locations because there is new information, new angles being covered.   

First, regarding the less captivating and less controversial situation in Maine, reported by Jess Bidgood in the NYT, the dateline is Cary Plantation in Aroostook County, population 69,447.   Bidgood quotes Diane Cassidy, a former nursing assistant who is leading the effort to dissolve the local government.    

What do you do, what does the town do, when they can’t pay their bills? Do we go bankrupt? Do we lose our homes?  There was no answer, other than deorganization.

Bidgood continues:

Ms. Cassidy is leading an effort to dissolve the local government here and join the Unorganized Territory, a vast swath of forest and townships in north, central and eastern Maine run by a partnership between the state and the counties. Last month, residents here voted 64 to 0 to continue the process. 

At a time of rising municipal costs, local governments around the country are looking for ways to rein in tax bills, pursuing privatization, the consolidation of services, mergers and even bankruptcy.

For more on local government bankruptcy and the challenges facing municipalities, read the work of Michelle Wilde Anderson.  Here's more from Bidgood's story:

But in northern Maine, as operating costs increased, the economy stagnated and the population aged and dwindled, a handful of struggling towns have pursued the unusual process of eliminating local government entirely. 

Bidgood quotes University of Maine professor of political science, Mark Brewer:

Just the price tag to keep their local governments up and running is more or less untenable.  It’s the final step in this long, drawn-out process which really starts with population decline.

Meanwhile, in the West, the struggle is to constrain local government power, although the local government in Harney County are not stepping forward to fill a void the Bundys would like to see created.  Indeed, the current elected officials in Harney County seem to be quite opposed to the Bundys and their tactics.

I have already written a great deal about the Bundy militia takeover of the wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, but a few pieces worthy of note have been published since my last post.  Like the reports about Maine, Wyoming, and Kentucky, important messages about these rural economies emerge.  Here's the latest from the New York Times, by Kirk Johnson, which I think provides incisive views of what's behind events in Harney County.  The headline says so much, "Rural Oregon's Lost Prosperity Gives Standoff a Distressed Backdrop":

Times were once very good out here on the high desert of east-central Oregon, and a place like Burns — remote and obscure until a group of armed protesters took over a nearby federal wildlife sanctuary this month — was full of civic pride and bustle. In their heyday, Harney County and its largest town, Burns, were economically important in a way that now seems unthinkable in the rural West.

There is so much to Johnson's story, which really does justice to the decades-long (downward) trajectory (or should I say "spiral"?) of the rural west.  After describing how metro centric and urbanormative (my words, not his) even Oregon has become (half of the state's jobs are in the three counties in and around Portland), Johnson closes with this quote from a 73-year-old who formerly worked in Burns's sawmills:

People in western Oregon don’t even know where Burns is.

And that is lent further perspective by this quote from state representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district includes Harney County:

People feel powerless.  ... As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there’s a shift in power.

Johnson does a fabulous job of providing heaps of economic context, including how rural poverty has changed from its early associations with Appalachia and the South, when the face of poverty was often children and elderly.  Now, many of those living in rural poverty are working age, and the jobs are just not there for them, leaving entire families in poverty.

And this, shocking and nonsensical as it is for urban folks, is what is behind the State of Jefferson movement, as well as the move behind succession of counties in northern Colorado.  Read more here and here.

But don't forget the economic angle.  Here's a quote from Ammon Bundy last week:

Government controls the land and resources ... [which] has put people in duress and put them in poverty.

(For a good rebuttal of this point, see this New Yorker piece).

Again, lest we assume this all boils down to local-federal tension, don't forget the state--let alone the tension within so-called local levels of government.  Johnson writes:  

Some residents and local officials say they believe the history and relationship between the people and the government is being distorted by the protesters, and that cooperation across lines has worked well, to the benefit of the community. For instance, an arrangement with private landowners to protect a threatened bird species, the sage grouse — and to prevent even more restrictive government protections — was a model of how cooperation can work, they said.

An earlier NYT story echoes this tension among locals.  Read more here ("Fervor in Oregon Compound Fear Outside It") and here.  Johnson also quotes Steven E. Grasty, Harney County judge, who is chair of the county commissioners:  

Those are things that Mr. Bundy doesn’t know about or care about it.  ... We can keep building on those things if he would get out of the way.

And this perspective, as much as anything, gives me hope for Harney County and the rest of the rural west.  Pragmatism and a stance of collaboration--not to mention a little empathy--are critical starting points to resolving not only the standoff, but ensuring some future for the ranchers.  

Coal in the news this week, from Appalachia to the Rockies

Here and here are two stories, both focusing on Wyoming, about the Obama administration's moratorium on new coal mining on public lands.  The latter, from NPR this morning, focuses on the consequences for state and local government budgets.  Stephanie Joyce, reporting for Wyoming Public Radio, includes this quote from Wyoming State Senator Michael Von Flatern, who represents Gillette, a in the middle of the state's coal region:  

MICHAEL VON FLATERN: Well, I think the first thing the state government will have to do if they truly believe this is going to be our future is to consider what the state will look like with 100,000 less people in it. 

JOYCE: That's maybe a little dramatic. But if the industry does stop expanding, it will have a big impact locally, and people are scared. You know, until recently, Wyoming has been relatively insulated from the coal industry's downturn, which has mostly affected those higher cost mines in Appalachia. And now that appears to be changing. Let's hear from Travis Deti with the Wyoming Mining Association. 

TRAVIS DETI: When the markets look at this and when the utilities look at this, it sends that signal that, hey, that coal's going to stay in the ground. You know, the administration has ravaged the industry back east, too, so this is just our little piece of the pie.

But the "other" coal country was also in the news recently, including this story out of Kentucky, with Steve Inskeep reporting under the headline, "In Kentucky, the Coal Habit is Hard to Break."  Inskeep reports from Webster County, Kentucky, population 13,226.  Here's an excerpt highlighting how well-paying coal mining jobs have been--often $100K or better annually, depending on overtime.

When we toured a Webster County mine that is still open — the Dotiki mine, operational since 1967 and owned by Alliance Coal — our producer Ashley Westerman had a surprise. Westerman, who is from Webster County, discovered one of her elementary school classmates working underground as a foreman. 

She went off to an East Coast university; he ended up in the mine. Depending on his overtime in a given year, it's likely that he is the one who is paid more.

Of course, with mines closing, those well-paying blue-collar jobs are drying up, as are local economies.  As Inskeep notes, Arch Coal, the county's second largest coal producer, filed for bankruptcy protection this week, as "companies are squeezed between fierce competition and efforts to fight climate change."

U.S. government sues FLDS to end religious discrimination

Here's the report from yesterday's Salt Lake Tribune, by Nate Carlisle, "A Century in the Making, the Federal Government Goes to Trial Against Two Polygamous Towns."   Here's the lede: 

The U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., goes to trial Tuesday in Phoenix, and there are some specific things that Colorado City resident Margaret Cooke wants out of it. 

For one thing, she wants a judge to order Colorado City to allow parcels to subdivide the way other towns do.

The other thing Cooke wants goes to the heart of the lawsuit: She wants Hildale and Colorado City, collectively known as Short Creek, to hire municipal employees and police officers who are not members of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"We then get our freedom from the bondage of the FLDS religion," Cooke said. "Basically, the whole government is FLDS and they want to keep us from living here peacefully." 

No one denies that the Short Creek municipal governments are filled with FLDS followers. The issue at the trial is what people have complained and argued about for a century: whether those municipal governments discriminate against people who do not follow the church and its imprisoned leader, FLDS President Warren Jeffs.

Neither Jeffs nor the church is a party in the case. Yet the trial will put the towns up against the one group that consistently defeats anything FLDS — juries.

 Prior blog posts about Short Creek and the FLDS are here, here and here.

What makes us care (or not) about rural America? One lawyer's story

This is a question I often ponder in this era when the world's population is quickly urbanizing, at a time when the United States' population continues its metropolitan trajectory, rural populations dwindling.

In 2006, I published Rural Rhetoric, and in it I quoted demographer and rural sociologist Dan Lichter in saying that most people now “come to know rural America only through stereotypical media portrayals, through exposure to rural vacation spots . . . or by traversing the rural countryside from city to city by automobile.”  I have often also thought (and perhaps I read this somewhere but don't recall the source)  that some of us know rural America from visiting grandparents there.  I think this is one of the reasons that states like Arkansas have what might be thought of as a a rural frame of mind or perspective or mentality, even when they are no longer dominantly rural in terms of where the majority of the people live.

  
All of that came to mind when I read the New York Times Magazine cover story from last week, "The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare." It is largely the story of Rob Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who agreed to represent an Appalachian cattle farmer named Wilbur Tennant in a suit against DuPont, which according to the story was dumping near the farmer's land, outside Parkersburg, West Virginia, a chemical it knew to be highly toxic.  

This passage, from the first and second paragraphs of the very long article, really grabbed me, as it describes the farmer's initial call to Bilott--and what kept the lawyer from hanging up:  

The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White. 

White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.

And so Bilott did not hang up the phone, and he ultimately agreed to represent the farmer.  That sentimentality about visits to rural grandparents reminds me of my own regarding my maternal grandparents, who were only slightly more rural than I was, but also my 11-year-old son's sentimentality around visiting my mother in rural Arkansas.  He absolutely loves being there, and I'm sure some of his deepest memories and connections are being formed in those trips, just as happened with Bilott.  

Back to the story:  Interestingly, though not surprisingly given rural social dynamics and the high density of acquaintanceship, Tennant, the aggrieved farmer,  had been "spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians." He was thus pressed to look for an outside lawyer.  Thankfully, he found Bilott.

Of course, the broader story is also one of a corporation taking advantage of low-SES, working class, rural folks (who happen to be white, I might add).  The piece, by Nathaniel Rich, is well worth a read in its entirety, a real David-vs.-Goliath tale.  

On rural public education, in of all places, "The [uber urban] Atlantic"

Rachel Martin reported from Fentress County, Tennessee, last week under the headline "Salvaging Education in Rural America."  The headline is an appropriate one as she takes up the many struggles facing K-12 public schools in rural America, especially those plagued by concentrated poverty.

When teachers, theorists, and pundits analyze America’s educational system, they usually focus on urban centers, but rural school systems make up more than half of the nation’s operating school districts, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Like many of their urban peers, children there fight to overcome scant funding, generational poverty, rampant malnutrition, and limited job prospects. 

* * *

Compared to students in urban or suburban schools, students in rural areas and small towns are less likely to attend college. Part of this is because of financial concerns. In Fentress County, close to 40 percent of children live in poverty.

The further details about Fentress County's economic and educational landscape are similarly sobering:

Another reason for their low college-attendance rates is that rural students come from places where higher education traditionally hasn’t been of much use. Previous generations could find good jobs in factories or agriculture, which is part of the reason why in Fentress County only 58 percent of adults have a high-school diploma. Just 8 percent have a bachelor’s degree—by some estimates, remove teachers from that calculation, and only 1 percent of adults have graduated college.

More demographic and economic information about Fentress County, population 17,855 and 98% white, is available here.  

Even if urban folks are aware of the depth of rural poverty, especially in persistent poverty places like Fentress County (and in my experience very few are, at least not in my corner of the ivory tower), I find they rarely consider the other implications of rurality, like material spatiality.  Martin explains:  

Rural students in Fentress County and elsewhere also have limited opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities (another factor that boosts a kid’s chances of graduating from high school and attending college); many of them simply live too far away to stay after school for practice or club meetings. One bus from York drives over an hour-and-a-half and then drops off a handful of kids at a car, which takes them the rest of the way home.

A friend of mine when I was growing up in rural Arkansas was in a similar situation.  Before and after a long bus ride to or from school, her mother transported a station wagon full of kids up a mountain to their homes.  This was always very memorable for me when I spent the night with her.  I had the luxury of living just outside the county seat and so my regular journey to and from school was just a few miles each way.  (See posts about the struggles of rural schools, including this one).   I have also written (here and here) about the impact on college admissions of the limited extracurricular opportunities available to rural kids.

I'm happy to see The Atlantic giving this issue attention.  It also reminds me of earlier posts, including this one about Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, in which she describes the ethos at a rural Tennessee school.  

I also found this description of a young man's daily commute from his home to the University of Tennessee, from a New York Times story about how corporate America's incursion into higher education services, including dining halls, is increasing the price of tertiary education.  Here's the lede from that story:

Before his 35-mile commute through Appalachian hills to classes here at the University of Tennessee, Michael Miceli eats a gigantic breakfast. It is his way of getting through the day without spending money on a campus lunch. 

Food deprivation is merely one trick Mr. Miceli uses to minimize his college debt, now creeping past $22,000. So the $300 bill he got from the university this semester — for food — sent him into a tailspin. 

“I was in near panic at the thought of having to borrow more money,” said Mr. Miceli, 23, a linguistics major.

And so the obstacles to higher education add up.

And that brings me back to The Atlantic story, which focuses on one public school in Fentress County:  Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute.  It's a novel institution in rural America in that it partners with a community college to offer a wider than usual (for rural schools) array of classes to "tiers" of students with different abilities.  The story is well worth a read to learn more about York Institute and the challenges associated with rural education.  Here's just a bit of history on the place:

The World War I hero Alvin C. York—who only had nine months of schooling—funded and built the institute because he wanted to prove Tennessee’s rural youth could accomplish anything given a proper education. In 1937, he donated the building, along with almost 400 acres, to the state. Its students have become politicians, business leaders, and educators. The astronaut Roger Crouch went there.

More recently, however, the state has turned it over to Fentress County to fund.