Connecting rural and small-town youth with higher education

Images are from STARS Network website

I recently learned of the STARS Network, that is the Small Town and Rural Students Network--when my own alma mater, the University of Arkansas, became one of its 32 members.  Here's how the organization describes itself: 

The STARS College Network, which partners with top colleges to ensure that students from rural and small-town America have the information and support they need to enroll and graduate from the college or university of their choice, is doubling its membership to include 32 of the nation’s most prominent institutions.

In its inaugural year, the STARS College Network opened doors to higher education for more than a quarter-million students. The expansion this summer will add flagship state schools, historically Black colleges, Ivy League universities, and other selective institutions, spreading STARS’ reach to more regions across the nation.

Support

In support of the STARS expansion, the Trott Family Philanthropies, which catalyzed the creation of STARS with an initial $20 million gift in 2023, will be investing more than $150 million over 10 years in programs that prepare, recruit and support rural students. Adding the financial aid provided directly by the STARS institutions to students, expanding support from philanthropies and non-profits and new funding from governmental agencies, an estimated $7.4 billion will be spent in support of STARS’ mission over the next decade. This extraordinary growth follows a year in which STARS outreach connected with 1.6 million people, including students, families, educators, administrators, foundations, legislators, companies and other organizations. STARS institutions directly engaged with more than 700,000 students, and more than 288,000 students joined the STARS network.

Partnerships

STARS schools directly engage with the rootEd Alliance, a public-private partnership that helps rural students define and plan their futures, whether that means a college degree, work-based learning, or military service, with the goal of putting them on a path to career success and economic stability. By placing dedicated college and career advisors in 195 schools across Missouri, Texas and Idaho, rootEd has served 42,000 students to date, and collaborates with STARS to provide specialized support and training for rootEd advisors throughout the year. rootEd Alliance, launched in 2018, is made possible by a group of philanthropists convened by Trott Family Philanthropies.

Meanwhile, this international publication on rural students' access to higher education came across my radar screen, "Access of rural youth to higher education: An international perspective," published in Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development 2024, 8(8), 5528.  The authors are Álvaro Andrés Rivera Sepúlveda, Omar Cabrales Salazar, and Lizeth Natalia Saboyá Acosta.  Here's the abstract: 

This is a review of empirical studies with the objective of analyzing the theoretical-practical discussions that have been raised internationally to deepen the understanding of the access of rural youth to higher education as an object of study. For this purpose, a narrative review was designed, considering scientific articles published in three different languages and concerning studies conducted in 21 different countries in all regions of the world. The results reveal three discussions: a) the strong interest that higher education has regained in the life expectations of rural young people and their families, especially as a means of social advancement; b) the inequalities that most affect the access of rural youth to higher education are the lack of academic offerings in rural areas and the discontinuities that occur around rural socio-cultural capital; c) since the inequalities experienced by rural youth are diverse, actions to promote greater democratization cannot be limited to implementing systems of grants and scholarships. It is concluded that the major project consists of creating a differentiated higher education model that, in terms of location, academic offerings, recognition of knowledge, and articulation with the environment, allows rural youth to experience their professional training not as an inevitable process of acculturation, but as a continuation of their socio-cultural capital and their territorial yearnings.

Rural women are vital to global food systems

As the United Nations Women Watch's overview on food security identifies, rural women not only act as food producers and agricultural entrepreneurs, they also informally facilitate food security and stability in their households and communities (another post on women in farming is here). Expanding on the latter point, both the UN Women's research on rural women and girls and a 2019 Root Capital article, "How Climate Change Impacts Women Farmers," suggests that rural women are well positioned to foster resilient agricultural hubs, due to demonstrated skill at community networking, mobilization, and adaption in the face of environmental threats and economic crises. 

Over the past few years, the International Day of Rural Women has consistently endeavored to draw attention to this often unappreciated reality. In 2021 the theme, "Rural Women Cultivating Good Food for All," spotlighted how investing in rural women engaged in agribusiness could help alleviate global food insecurity. Food insecurity, which has been exacerbated by recent climate crises (discussed here) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (discussed here), affects upwards of 800 million people worldwide, including over 33 million Americans, who are disproportionately from communities of color and in rural areas (previous posts on food insecurity in the U.S. here and here). 

The premise, as informed by National Geographic's article, "Empowering female farmers to feed the world," is that gender-specific barriers, such as discriminatory practices, limited access to resources, and misogynistic social norms, prevent rural women from maximizing their agricultural and economic potentials. Consider, despite equivalent competency, on average women-run farms tend to produce smaller crop yields and generate less profit than those run by men. If barriers were eliminated, rural women might be able to close the gap between them and their male counterparts, in ways that would also strategically amplify their existing contributions to global poverty and hunger reduction. Citing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the National Geographic article estimates that if women farmers were provided equal access to resources, then global food production by women could increase by up to 30%, providing food to roughly 150 million additional people. 

While obstacles to rural women farmers vary depending on regional particularities, certain impediments can be identified fairly consistently across contexts. Specifically, as discussed in a 2018 World Bank story, "Breaking the 'Grass Ceiling': Empowering Women Farmers," inequitable access to both land rights and financing opportunities, influenced by historic and ongoing gender-bias, emerges as a common limiting phenomenon. Synthesizing the World Bank story and the National Geographic article, this can be seen in certain developing countries where women comprise half of the agricultural labor force, but only make up 10% of landowners. Without autonomy over the land they are farming, women cannot structure land use and farming agreements to maximize their benefit. As a related matter, smallholder women farmers in these areas can struggle to access credit in the face of insufficient collateral and sexist cultural norms. Accordingly, they must operate under a funding deficit that can place advanced tools and techniques capable of improving production out of reach.

Focusing now on rural America, one can see that parallel limitations similarly inhibit women farmers. On one hand, as noted by the American Farmland Trust's 2021 report on "Women in Agriculture," women are currently outpacing men in agricultural education programs throughout the country (at UC Davis, in 2019-2020, 75% of students who earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture-related majors were women). Despite this, women are the principle operator on only 14% of U.S. farming operations. The American Farmland Trust report contextualizes this statistic within additional research documenting women farmers' obstacles to obtaining land, including exclusion from networks, challenges accessing credit and obtaining conservation support, and patriarchal norms that prioritize male heirs.

The American Farmland Trust report further notes that disparities in access to loans and capital hit women farmers of color the hardest. This is, in part, a result of women and farmers of color tending to run relatively smaller operations with lower revenues and weaker credit histories, but also the product of implicit bias in resource and loan provision. Additionally, as theorized in a 2022 National Institute of Health study, "Decolonizing agriculture in the United States," the predominant agricultural narrative in the U.S. has been constructed around white masculinity in ways that exclude women and people of color from our cultural imaginary of who a farmer is and should be. 

Juxtaposition of two feminist projects grappling with these issues shows a range of approaches being employed to support women farmers in the United States. The first, a One Earth-backed project, "Supporting Black Women farmers working to expand regenerative agriculture in the Southeastern US," embodies concrete resource-based programmatic support that must be paramount. Specifically, this project will expand on the American Farmland Trust's existing partnership with the Black Family Land Trust in order to promote land access, enhanced viability, and increased resilience for black women farmers. The second, FarmHer, a social media campaign initiated by Marji Guyler-Alaniz in 2013, represents a supplementary resistance strategy. This internet-based photo project aims to update modern conceptions of farmers in ways that recognize, celebrate, and recruit women.

Beyond these select examples, SeedChange, an organization committed to supporting farmers and combatting hunger, poverty, and climate change, provides broader recommendations for empowering women farmers. Specifically, its publication, "Women Seed Change," advocates for the following actions:

(1) strengthen women's leadership by funding women-led farmer organizations ... (2) prioritize women's knowledge and agency in climate resilient agriculture ... (3) invest in women farmers, including youth and indigenous women ... (4) develop gender equity frameworks to guide policies ... (5) enhance women's agency, decision-making power and rights over land and productive resources [and] (6) uphold the rights of women ...    

In short, rural women in agriculture are vital to global food systems, and they need robust support from a range of domestic and international institutions.

How rural Arizona students treat a Filipina teacher who came to help

 Eli Saslow reports for the Washington Post out of Bullhead City, Arizona, under the headline, "An American education."  The subhead is, "Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona."  The alternative headline is, "Teachers from Philippines Help Struggling U.S. Schools."  And the essence is that an award-winning teacher in the Philippines came to help a rural school district experiencing a teacher shortage, and then had to endure awful behavior by the students.  Here are some excerpts, first about the teacher, Rose Jean Obreque, who, in order to get to the U.S., took out "$8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers."

Here's how the students in her home country are described: 

Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.

Then there are her students in America, whose behavioral issues Eli describes in considerable detail, including: 

Another [student] had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.

“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”

“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”

Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”

“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.

“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”

“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.

“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.

“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.

“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”

Then there is the model provided by Ann Cuevas, a teacher who has been in Bullhead City for four years and survived:

She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.

Don't miss the rest of the story.  

John Kelly overlooks rural America--and Christopher Ingraham pounces

Christopher Ingraham, the uber urbanite turned rural refugee/transplant who writes for the Washington Post, dug into John Kelly, President Trump's Chief of Staff on Friday after Kelly spoke against the immigration of "overwhelmingly rural people" who would not "easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society."

Kelly also cited immigrants' education levels, English-language ability and general workplace skills as potential barriers to assimilation. But the choice of “rural” as a detriment for integration into modern society is an odd one, given that it applies to nearly 1 in 5 current residents of the United States. 

* * * 

While rural places account for 19.3 percent of the population, they make up 97 percent of the country's land area. Geographically speaking, the country is “overwhelmingly rural.” And in several states, including politically important ones, the rural population is much higher than 19 percent.

Ingraham's story is here.  The Kelly interview with NPR is here; you will see that its focus is not on the rural-urban divide or any rural issues.  Rather, it is on immigration more broadly, along with some other issues du jour.

Nevertheless, Ingraham picks up the rural torch:

More broadly, rurality remains a central part of American identity — wide-open spaces, amber waves of grain, mom and apple pie — in ways that population figures don't fully capture. In many quarters of the national political conversation, rural America still gets conflated with “real America.” 

All of this brings me to an issue I have explored elsewhere:  in what ways is the "rural" part(s) of a developing world country (often with majority of population) similar to the rural parts of America (with a shrinking minority of the population)?  Read some here and here.  In other words, does Ingraham's argument hold water?  Will rural folks from the developing world have an easy time integrating into America because America is roughly (less than!) a fifth rural?  But aren't rural Americans culturally highly marginalized?  Wasn't that a major lesson of the 2016 election?

Also, of what relevance is it if/that rural Americans are less tolerant of immigrants (those other rural people from elsewhere in the world) than are urban Americans?  That intolerance has been a common theme of much of the "race v. economy" speculation over the reasons for the rise of Trump, so is it fair for Ingraham to ignore it? Is it appropriate for Ingraham to invoke America's "rural-ness" in support of an argument for immigration from largely rural countries?

Rural communities and renewable energies

Small, remote, economically challenged communities have successfully integrated renewable energy into their existing, diesel-based power grids with more success than just about anywhere else in the world.

What? That's not possible.

Apparently it is.

Renewable Energy Alaska Project (REAP) is doing just what its name says - and seemingly with much success. Scientific American recently re-published an article by David W. Shaw from Ensia wherein Shaw describes the successes of "microgrids" in rural Alaska. Using hydro and wind energy sources, these microgrids created by REAP actually decrease costs of energy for communities in remote areas of Alaska. Let me say that again. Renewable energy is decreasing the cost of energy in rural Alaska.

According to Shaw, some of the more remote areas of Alaska pay up to $1 per kilowatt-hour for electricity. That is eight times the national average of just 12 cents. Obviously more than just a few kilowatt hours of electricity are needed to get by, especially in Alaska. That's expensive.

Here in Davis, CA, Pacific Gas & Electric charges me and my two roommates 18.3 cents per kilowatt hour for our electricity. After glimpsing at some past bills, it seems like we use about 210 kWh per month. That means that if we lived in one of these rural areas of Alaska, and used the same amount of electricity, we would be paying over $200 per month (plus whatever additional cost for gas). That's a low estimate for an Alaskan home because in Davis, we are lucky enough to rarely need heat in our home. Now, imagine a business owner, or a larger family, or someone with medical needs that require equipment that runs on electricity, or even one step further, a hospital. Energy costs are a huge concern.

One study, published by the UN Foundation, looked at 12  microgrids in three developing countries (India, Malaysian Borneo, and Haiti). The study examined factors that allow the energy models to "thrive or struggle." These factors are tariff design, tariff collection mechanisms, maintenance and contractor performance, theft management, demand growth, load limits, and local training and institutionalization. The study asserts that "microgrids – distributed systems of local energy generation, transmission, and use – are today technologically and operationally ready to provide communities with electricity services, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas of less developed countries." The success of the microgrids depends largely on the organizing body's ability to adapt to each individual community and also take into account the business model (whether the project is for-profit or subsidized to some extent). Another more macro-breakdown of "best practices" for microgrid project planning in rural areas that the study provides is based on three areas: Social Context, Strategic Planning, and Operations.

The price benefits in rural areas of these developing countries are even greater than in rural Alaska. According to the study, "Many households in rural areas of the developing world depend entirely on traditional fuels." The study reports that using wood or kerosene for a stove may cost $2/KWh hour while grid connection could reduce that cost to just 10 cents. Other benefits include "improved health, safety, productivity and education;" this is largely due to replacing kerosene with electricity.

Back in Alaska, REAP's model has successfully used microgrids to provide electricity for small geographical areas with individual communities. Like the study discussed above suggests, Shaw describes these microgrids as "customized." That's exactly what they are. Piper Foster Wilder, deputy director of REAP, explains that they go into each community where a new microgrid will be built and figure out which resources are most abundant and how they should split up energy sourcing to be most efficient. She also notes that some of the Alaskan towns are primed for this project because of their topography, which has led to the great success of using wind and hydro power on a small scale. Each project is specific to both place and community.

Shaw's main point in his article is that these microgrid models are working. "Some 1.2 billion people on the planet do not currently have access to electricity. And there’s a lot these people can learn from Alaska." At least in rural Alaska, the microgrid model has saved families and businesses a lot of money through decreasing the cost of keeping the lights on.

For previous posts on renewable energy in rural areas, see here, here and here. And then read this previous post about legislation to help California farmers use easements for solar energy to offset land costs.

The FCC's (continued) plan to expand broadband service

Internet access is essential in today's world. If you want to conduct an effective job search, apply to an educational program, find a good doctor, access quality news, or learn anything about the modern world, having access to the internet is imperative. Maybe saying it is essential across the board is too strong, but in today's world, lack of internet access is a high barrier to economic progress.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began a plan to expand broadband access across the country in 2010. (This is not the first time that such a plan has come down from the White House.) Now, their Connect America Fund (CAF), created in 2011, is in "Phase II." The FCC uses the fund to subsidize the costs of expanding broadband coverage to areas that are underserved. Service providers must accept the monetary support in order to receive the subsidy during the six-year implementation of the program. "The FCC has focused on areas that are clearly unserved or underserved by unsubsidized service providers." This means rural America. (In the past, the FCC has also expressed heightened awareness of Native American's need for broadband access.) Service providers in some areas have not accepted the funding and thus are not required to provide broadband in their locale, at least not at FCC standards. Here's a map of "Accepted Areas," where CAF funds are being put to use as of September, 2015.

The broadband service provided under the fund has certain minimum requirements to ensure that access to internet in participating areas is not minimum quality and maximum price. There are requirements for speed, latency, usage allowance, and even pricing. The pricing requirement reads, "Service providers must offer service at rates reasonably comparable to rates in urban areas." This seems like a high bar; it is much more expensive for a provider to bring coverage to sparsely populated areas than to urban centers.

The FCC boldly claims that "Consumers everywhere – both urban and rural – will benefit." I read that as a goal, not a reflection of reality. There is a long way to go before all consumers are benefitting from the program.

On their "Progress Portal" for the CAF, the FCC website links to data reflecting the progress of their five main goals:

• Preserve and advance voice service
• Ensure universal availability of voice and broadband to homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions
• Ensure universal availability of mobile voice and broadband where Americans live, work, or travel
• Ensure reasonably comparable rates for broadband and voice services
• Minimize universal service contribution burden on consumers and businesses.

This spreadsheet shows "High-Speed Internet Penetration by State" between 2014 and 2015. New Mexico was the only state to actually decrease on their metric. Alaska showed the next worse progress, an increase of only .3%, where the margin of error is about 1%. Arkansas, Iowa, and New Jersey also showed less than a 1% increase. World Atlas reports Alaska and New Mexico among the six least densely populated states. Internet access is improving, but the improvements may be slow and disproportionate. That is not surprising.

As far as ensuring "reasonably comparable rates," the Progress Portal says that only 120 service areas are not in compliance. Meaning there are 120 areas where service providers are charging rates incomparable with rates in urban areas.

The Daily Gazette, based out of Schenectady, New York, recently reported that the fund is providing $170 million to support broadband access in Upstate NY. Democratic Senators Schumer and Gillibrand praised the move, expressing hope that it would address a widespread problem of lack of broadband access in rural areas. The article cites that as of December of 2015, 239,000 households did not have access to the benchmark internet speeds set by the FCC. Time will tell how big of an impact this funding will have in rural areas.

In 2020, Phase II will reach its six year mark and the FCC plans to do an evaluation of the program. They plan for a "competitive bidding process" in areas that are still "unserved." Some areas receive coverage from what they call "rate-of-return" carriers, which are not eligible for the Phase II funds, but are subsidized nonetheless.

See this blog post on broadband access in India.

New: Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology

The volume, edited by Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, was published just this week.  Here's what the promotional blurb from Routledge has to say about it:  

49% of the world’s population lives in small towns, villages and farms, yet until recent years criminological scholarship has focused almost exclusively on urban crimes. The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology is the first major publication to bring together this growing body of scholarship under a single cover. For many years rural criminology has remained marginalized and often excluded from the mainstream, with precedence given to urban criminology: this volume intends to address that imbalance. 

Pioneering in scope, this book brings together leading international scholars from fourteen different countries to offer an authoritative synthesis of theoretical and empirical literature. This handbook is divided in to seven parts, each addressing a different aspect of rural criminology:

• Rurality and crime

• Criminological dimensions of food and agriculture

• Violence and rurality

• Drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context

• Intersections between rural and green criminology

• Policing, justice and rurality

• Teaching rural criminology

Edited by a world renowned scholar of rural criminology, this book explores rural crime issues in over thirty-five countries including Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Tanzania, the US, and the UK. This is the first Handbook dedicated to rural criminology and is an essential resource for criminologists, sociologists and social geographers engaged with rural studies and crime.

I, along with David G. Gomez, UC Davis Law School Class of 2015, contributed a chapter on Rural Adolescent Substance Use:  Community Causes and Cures.  You can read the abstract here.  

The full table of contents of the Handbook is here.

Where do falling gas prices leave the hydraulic fracturing industry?

Although filling up your tank for less than $20 is not in the foreseeable future, gas prices have been falling in a dramatic fashion this fall. Gas prices are at their lowest in early 4 years, under $3.00 a gallon in much of California and under $3 across most of the United States Crude oil was selling for just above $80 a barrel at the close of market this past Thursday. This is the lowest that oil prices have been since December 2012 and is down from a year high of about $100. Worse news for oil producers is that the price is projected to stay around this level for the remainder of 2014.

The decrease in the domestic gas price is likely attributable to several factors, the most important being the implementation of alternative energy and shale oil resources in the United States and Canada.

Shale oil is derived from the ground by a process known as hydraulic fracking, or simply ‘fracking’. Fracking entails forcing a mixture of chemicals, sand and water into the ground to force apart shale rocks and release gas. U.S. drilling companies have become so adept at fracking that the United States is forecasted to be energy independent as early as 2020.

Key natural gas sources for fracking are situated beneath rural and historically poorer areas, like the Marcellus-Utica shale formation, which spans parts New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The fracking explosion has transformed many of these rural communities. Some living in fracking territory have benefited from jobs or the sale of mineral leases and drilling rights. However, the recent drop in oil price may compromise these benefits. 

According to a recent report by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a price of $80 a barrel would cause many hydraulic-fracturing projects to become uneconomical due to costs associated with fracking. The Wall Street Journal writes: “[w]hile fracking costs run the gamut, producers often break even around $80 to $85.”

The price will likely continue to fall this November. At OPEC’s upcoming November meeting, it is anticipated that OPEC will not reduce their output to adjust for the decline in price.

Perhaps this forecasting sheds light on the rationale behind Chesapeake Energy Corporation's recent sale of their Utica and Marcellus shale positions. The company said earlier this month that it was set to sell these shale assets to rival Southwestern Energy Co. for more than $5 billion.

So where does this leave rural America?

While the future of fracking cost effectiveness is in question, the future of rural America is not. Even if fracking positions are liquidated, the negative environmental and social impacts associated with fracking will likely persist. Further, the negative associated with the short-term economic gains will begin to surface.

These negative economic costs are assessed by Mark Partridge, the C. William Swank Chair of Rural-Urban Policy at Ohio State University and a professor in the Agricultural, Environment, and Development Economics Department. He writes:

Many impact studies also fail to account for possible offsetting negative effects from energy development that may offset the positive effects such as any crowding out of other economic activity that would have occurred otherwise (e.g., entrepreneurs outside of energy may try other locations with more stable labor markets). Higher prices (especially for housing) may also offset some of the benefits of higher wages potentially negatively affecting quality of life in the area. In addition, many of the benefits may trickle away to other areas due to commuting workers, purchases outside the region, and absentee landowners receiving the lease payments. Finally, perceived or real environmental degradation may frighten some current residents and potential residents away— especially in the long-run. The take-away is that communities should be wary of industry funded economic impact studies (regardless of the industry) and should try to verify economic impact estimates with independent experts.

He concludes:

[t]he general lesson is that short-term energy booms do not necessarily translate into long-term economic prosperity.

In short, rural America may actual be in a worse position now --both economically and environmentally--than prior to the early '90s shale ventures.

Poverty, education and the future of the ‘Two-Track System’ in rural China

China is a global superpower. The nation is poised to pass United States as the world’s leading economic power as early as this year. However, China's rural population has not kept pace with this growth. Disparity in income and education between rural and urban Chinese increases exponentially as the country generally thrives fiscally.

The Chinese government defines its rural poor as those people who earn a net income of ¥2,300 per year. Converted to the United States dollar, 2,300 Chinese yuan equates to about $375 per year: slightly above $1 a day.  China has made many efforts to reduce poverty in rural China since the late 1970s, including adoption of broad rural economic reform. On the whole these reform has been fruitless.

“Poverty is still a salient problem in China,” stated deputy director of the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office, Zheng Wenkai. “About 200 million Chinese, or 15% of the country’s population, would be considered poor by international poverty measures, set at $1.25 a day.” Zheng Wenkai acknowledged that these rural poor “not only live on low incomes, but also face [the] difficulties of getting education, electricity, medical care, bank loans, and so on.”
He also noted that these people are subject to inadequate infrastructure and are more vulnerable to impacts from natural disasters. Zheng Wenkai did confirm that China plans to use ‘various methods’ of poverty relief this year. China has led a 'war' on rural poverty, and has celebrated that there has been a decrease in rural poverty over the last 40 years. But, do those numbers reflecting an actual reduction in poverty? Or are they simply the product of a misconstrued causation vs. correlation analysis? My opinion is that it could be a little both, as China has certainly not been immune to the global rural-to-urban migration phenomenon that is occurring globally.

Rural-to-urban migration in China has likely been instrumental in reducing the country’s poverty rates. According to the Wall Street Journal, “[a]bout 53.7% of China’s population lived in urban areas by the end of last year, up from 40.5% a decade earlier,” [as reported by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.] As half of the population lives in rural areas, and a large portion of that community is economically stressed, China must investigate real solutions (that is, solutions other than  migration to urban areas) for its impoverished rural population. One solution that China touts is education reform.

China has a unique education system known as the "Two-Track System". The system developed from shortages in educational resources. The Two-Track System was designed so that rural areas could be supported by local communities and county government, while urban schools were supported by the central government. This led to a separation in that yielded unequal education opportunities and relatively poor quality of education for rural students. To date, urban communities have modernized their education system and content with materials matching the evolving technology, growing economy, and globalization, but the rural schooling system is stagnant.

China has previously attempted educational reform attempts. In December 27, 2005, the government announced that China would spend 218 billion yuan (27.25 billion U.S. dollars) through 2010 to improve rural education. However, it seems that these efforts were somewhat frustrated. During the economic crisis, many migrant and rural children’s schools were actually closed. This displaced many rural students, forcing them to attend a geographically centralized schools. This means that rural students either have to travel great distances to attend school, or wait for another school to be made available to them.

China has vowed to reduce the number of rural people in poverty by 10 million this year, as it celebrates ‘China Poverty Alleviation Day’ this October. For this to occur, I believe better funding of rural Chinese schools is of critical importance.

China was on the right track with the 2005 yuan pledge to rural schools. For reform to be successful long-term, China must make sure that it delivers primary education to rural China. For primary education in China and rural China to be successful overall, the nation needs to recognize that funding for education must expand beyond that of the local government. In addition to financial aid to the institutions, China could increase teacher salary in these areas, provide scholarships to student’s families, as well as provide for a form of rural affirmative action at the secondary and college level.

Will sustainable metropolitan growth patterns aid rural economies?

With growing concerns of climate change and heightened awareness of human impact on the environment, municipal and county metropolitan governments have begun formulating more sustainable regional growth and transportation patterns. At the same time, rural areas continue to see lower income rates,higher poverty rates, and a lag in employment growth, compared to their urban counterparts. The issue I will examine below is whether there is an intersection between the shift in metropolitan development patterns and the various economic plights of rural communities. I will, also, speculate on the potential affect the shift in metropolitan growth patterns will have on outlying rural areas.

In northern California, the Sacramento AreaCouncil of Governments (“SACOG”), a governmental body of elected officials from the six counties and 22 cities in the Sacramento area, has developed a sustainable metropolitan growth and transportation plan. In effort to curve the environmental harm of Sacramento Area residents, SACOG’s sustainable strategy seeks to create regional job centers (verses one, large, central job center), improve the efficiency of rural-urban public transportation, and move some manufacturing and other industry outside of urban cores.

Recognizing that more than half of commuters to Sacramento’s urban core are coming from adjacent areas, SACOG has included in its plan a way to ensure that an increased percentage of new jobs, in adjacent areas, are filled by residents of those areas. For example, in neighboring Rancho Cordova, CA, 43% of new jobs are expected to be filled by residents of Rancho Cordova. This aspect of SACOG'a plan is focused on increasing the number of regional job centers to decrease the amount of regional commuting and increase the amount of job creation within close proximity to existing housing.

SACOG’s plan, also, includes improving publictransportation by—among other things—increasing the number of rapid transit bus lines to areas outside of the urban core. Additionally, the growth strategy encourages moving manufacturing, processing plants, suppliers, distributors, and other industry further outside of the urban core to minimize inefficient shipping trave

Despite the fact that the counties surrounding the urban core of Sacramento are technically “metropolitan” and not “rural”, by the US Census standard, this encouraged trend of multiple regional job centers, improved rural-urban pubic transit, and movement of industry outside of urban cores could still, potentially, benefit even those areas officially dubbed “rural.” I say this because if sustainable growth—like the growth SACOG promulgates—increases, then more regional job centers will spread outward from urban cores, across the county. Thus, more and more rural communities will be closer to some semblance of an economic hub that is well connected to transit. There is, also, the potential that industry may move away from these less-metropolitan regional job centers and into US Census classified, rural communities.

There may be a loose crossroads between the development of transit-efficient regional job centers and the economic improvement of rural communities. However, I am, merely, predicting that as sustainable growth encourage regional job centers, improved transit, and the voyage of bits of industry away from urban cores, rural areas will have increased access to nearby jobs and transportation resources; thus, rural economies might very well improve.

Rural as a Dimension of Environmental Justice: Call for Papers

Abstracts Due: October 1, 2014

Papers Invited for Submission Due: February 1, 2015

Submission: Email abstracts (up to 350-words) to Loka Ashwood (Ashwood@wisc.edu) and Kate MacTavish (kate.mactavish@oregonstate.edu).

Changing community and production dynamics make rural places a state-sanctioned site for some of the most hazardous and toxic industries of our time. From its production treadmill, industrial agriculture has cast onto rural areas a plethora of negative externalities: mounting levels of air and water pollution, farm consolidation, and depopulation. A range of extractive and other risky industries justify the siting of facilities in rural areas because of easy access to ample natural resources, sparse populations that reduce exposure risk, and the possibility of economic revitalization.  State and federal statutes in the U.S. context (e.g., Right To Farm laws, the Federal Code of Regulations for Nuclear Operations) often permit these industries to target rural America based on past practice and low population levels.  

Cities serve as powerful hubs for the global economy, pulling away resources from less prominent urban and rural areas. The growing periphery within core countries, as well as continued resource extraction of rural places abroad, calls for increased attention to the rural facets of injustice in developed and developing countries. 

We invite paper submissions that explore facets of the rural that help explain rural places’ vulnerability to environmental injustices from interdisciplinary perspectives, including (but not limited to) sociology, geography, law, anthropology, public health, and the environmental sciences. We are especially keen to receive papers from scholars working broadly on issues of environmental justice in order to foster conversation between those scholars and scholars whose focus on the rural more generally.

Abstracts of interest will be reviewed and then select papers will be invited for full paper submission on February 1, 2015.  Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies.

Literary Ruralism (Part IX): Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

This highly acclaimed novel begins with two brothers growing up in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s.  Given how often I hear the word "village" used to refer to any of a wide variety of places, especially in the developing world but also in places like New England, I found this passage of particular interest.  It is at the juncture at which Subhash, the eldest son, has gone off to university:

A few months later Subhash also traveled to a village: This was the word the Americans used. An old-fashioned word, designating an early settlement, a humble place. And yet the village had once contained a civilization: a church, a courthouse, a tavern, a jail. 

The university had begun as an agricultural school. A land grant college still surrounded by greenhouses, orchards, fields of corn. On the outskirts were the lush pastures of scientifically cultivated grass, routinely irrigated and fertilized and trimmed.

p. 34.

From rural to urban in Rwanda

That is a theme of this piece by Nicholas Kulish in the New York Times, Rwanda Reaches for New Economic Model.  The lede follows:

On the 12th floor of the Kigali City Tower, a modern blue-glass office building on the side of one of this capital’s famous hills, the latest endeavor in the effort to transform a tiny rural economy into a financial and high-tech hub is trying to find its footing.

* * * 

Beneath the heights of Kigali City Tower, the rusty corrugated iron roofs on the ramshackle one- and two-story buildings below testify to the challenge of Rwanda’s goal: becoming a middle-income country. Beyond the city limits, an estimated 90 percent of the population is still employed in the country’s terraced green hills, growing bananas, sorghum, potatoes and other crops, much of it subsistence farming.

I was in Rwanda working as a gender consultant for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the fall of 1996.  The photo shown is from that time.  It was taken near Ruhengeri, as I hiked up to see the mountain gorillas one week-end.

Grieving a nation's rural past, through literature

The New York Times Saturday profile on September 8 featured South Korean writer, Shin Kyung-Sook.  Journalist Choe Sang-Hun discusses Shin's life, including her migration with her mother from rural Korea to Seoul at age 15 in 1978.  Choe also notes parallels between Shin's life and the novelist's poignant fiction, set against the same backdrop of the nation's rapid industrialization and the accompanying rural-to-urban migration in the 1970s and 1980s.  In short, Shin's work often grieves the nation's rural past, and what has been lost in the nation's transition to the world's 13th largest economy.  Choe writes:

Seoul-bound trains at the time, like the one mother and daughter [Shin] boarded that night, picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way--part of the migration that fueled South Korea's industrialization but forever changed its traditional family life.  

It is that social upheaval that Ms. Shin evoked in her most famous novel to date, "Please Look After Mom," which earned her the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and a commercial success attained by few other Korean writers.

Shin Soo-jeong, a professor of Korean literature at Myongji University in Seoul, is quoted:

In [Shin's] novels, readers have the chance to pause and reflect upon the other side of their society's breakneck race for economic growth, what they have lost in that pursuit and upon people who were left behind in the mad rush.

Choe's feature continues:

In "Please Look After Mom", an elderly woman from the countryside travels to Seoul to visit her children and gets lost in what is quite literally a mad rush:  the scramble to get on a Seoul subway.  Reviewers have called her disappearance a metaphor for the profound sense of loss in a society that hurtled from an agrarian dictatorship to an industrialized democracy within a single and often tumultuous generation.  

As I was searching for the digital version of this story to link to it here, I came across this May, 1971 story that highlights the Korean rural-urban divide of that time.  Indeed, the headline is "In South Korea, Urban Affluence and Rural Poverty."  Takashi Oka's story compared the lives of a skilled worker in a Kia motorcycle factory outside Seoul and a rice farmer in an isolated mountain village in southeastern South Korea.  The latter, working with his father, harvested 70 bags of rice a year with his father, without any power tillers.  The village in which he lived was without electricity though he said he was able to keep in touch with the outside world by radio.  He also noted that the lives of the villagers had been improved by better paths from their homes to the rice paddies, which permitted the use of bicycle carts to bring the harvest in.  Previously, they had accomplished using wooden A frames, strapped on their backs.  In contrast, the factory worker in Seoul owned a three-room house with a kitchen (purchased for $1600), half a mile from his factory.  The city dweller also owned a bicycle, sewing machine, record player and a radio.

Rural Women and the Limits of Law: Reflections on CSW 56

The United Nations 56^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 56) featured as its priority theme this year “the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.” This focus on rural women is long overdue, given that rural women comprise a quarter of the world’s population. Further, women provide 43% of the world’s agricultural labor, and they produce half of the world’s food for direct consumption. In fact, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) discovered some time ago that women—whom many refer to as the “architects of food security”—are key agents of development. One reason for this is that when women and girls receive income, they reinvest 90% of it in their families. In spite of their transformative potential to reduce hunger and poverty, women own less than 2% of land worldwide and they receive less than 10% of available credit.

As one whose scholarship focuses on rural livelihoods in both the United States and abroad, I was pleased to attend three days of the two-week CSW 56 event (February 27-March 9) as an observer for the American Society of International Law. As a former gender consultant for the United Nations, I was prepared for some of what I saw (e.g., bureaucracy), but the experience also held a few surprises. One thing that intrigued me about the “Session”—which is not a session at all but a dizzying array of “high-level round tables” and other meetings, panel discussions, “side events,” and “parallel events”—is that discussion of law was relatively absent. Furthermore, relatively little of the substance of these gatherings focused on rural women in a way that went beyond adding the modifier “rural” to whatever issue was being discussed. Rather than engaging with the circumstances that often distinguish rural women’s lives from those of their urban counterparts, many of the sessions seemed merely to “add rural women and stir” in relation to a well-recognized (and admittedly very important) women’s issue (e.g., female genital mutilation, child marriage). Other sessions did take up issues more central to rural livelihoods, including spatial removal from services and agents of the state, and women’s roles in agricultural production. The lack of significant engagement with the particular challenges facing rural women is reflected in the fact that none of the resolutions adopted by the Commission was about rural women. Nor did the Commission adopt any agreed conclusions on the priority theme of the 56^th Session.

In contrast to CSW’s somewhat anemic approach to the priority theme, Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) addresses the rights of rural women as a group. Indeed, CEDAW is the first human rights treaty to recognize rural difference, to acknowledge rural populations. While Article 14 guarantees to rural women all the rights enumerated elsewhere in CEDAW, the article also addresses rights specific to rural women. These include the right:

• to be involved in “development planning at all levels”;
• to benefit from “all community and extension services” among other types of education;
• to “organize self-help groups and cooperatives in order to obtain equal access to economic opportunities”;
• “to have access to agricultural credit and loans, marketing facilities, appropriate technology and equal treatment in land and agrarian reform, as well as in land resettlement schemes”; and
• “to enjoy adequate living conditions, particularly in relation to housing, sanitation, electricity and water supply, transport and communications.”

Read more about Article 14, its history, and its implementation here, here, and here. Given the particular attention paid to rural women in this germinal women’s rights treaty, one might have anticipated considerable attention to the provision and its potential at CSW 56. Not so at the sessions I attended. I heard Article 14 mentioned only a couple of times.

It is a common bias among lawyers to presume law can solve problems and should be used to do so. Lawyers may be more skeptical about whether international law is effective at solving problems, attributing failures to the lack of enforceability of international law and the lack of respect for the rule of law, particularly in the developing world. As a ruralist, I have asserted that law is less effective at addressing problems in rural locales for some similar reasons. That is, when legal institutions and legal actors (including lawyers) are literally less present, laws on the books are less potent and the rule of law withers. All of these issues related to the relevance, authority, and efficacy of law were in play—sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly—in the attention CSW 56 gave to rural women.

Many of the participants in CSW 56 were not lawyers—nor were they UN or national officials. Rather, the vast majority of participants were associated with NGOs that have consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Indeed, on each morning of CSW 56, officials with UN Women held a briefing for NGO representatives (also referred to as “civil society”). By the middle of the first week, UN Women announced that 1,598 NGO representatives from 358 NGOs were engaged in the annual gathering.

At these daily briefings, UN Women officials offered affirmations to NGO representatives, assuring them of the importance of their efforts. The UN officials also offered updates on what was happening at the “high-level meetings” that few NGO representatives had permission to attend. In spite of their exclusion from many of the events where member states were in direct talks, NGOs presented a robust and varied array of panel discussions. A tiny sampling of the topics and their sponsors follows:

• Women and Corruption: Grassroots Experiences and Strategies, Huairou Commission, UN Development Program

• Empowering Caregivers to Build Healthy Sustainable Communities, Huairou Commission, GROOTS International, International Council of Women

• Rural Women's Groups and Key Stakeholders Frame Joint Actions, Government of Norway, Huairou Commission, GROOTS International, UN Women, UN-Non Governmental Liaison Service, Baha'i International Community, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, World Food Program, Landesa

• Rural Women Speak: Land, Health and Rights in Africa, FEMNET

• Rural Girls and Urban Migration: The Role of Communications for Development in Bridging the Divide, UN-HABITAT, Plan International, UNESCO, Women in Cities International

• Measuring Change for Rural Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Global Fund for Women

Here is a link to the official programming, and a full listing of the NGO programming is here.

While most commentators in these parallel and side events presumed developing world contexts, a few offered reminders that biases against women persist in the developed world, too, including in relation to agriculture. In other words, Australia, Canada, the United States (just to name a few) all have work to do to empower women, including those in rural areas. (To be clear, unlike these other nations, the U.S. has never ratified CEDAW and is not bound by it).

This sampling of events demonstrates my earlier points about both the relative absence of attention to law’s role in solving the problems of rural women (and perhaps, by implication, all women), and also the shortage of programming regarding issues unique to rural women. To the extent that the particular concerns and circumstances of rural women were center stage, the focus typically related to agriculture. Among these were issues such as access to credit and means of marketing their products, the relative merits of “sustainable” agriculture versus intensive production agriculture, and an issue that more squarely implicates law: women’s right to own land. Officials from UN Women reported that diplomats participating in CSW 56 were sharing examples of legislation that would achieve land reform and improve land distribution schemes, but in the next breath they acknowledged the challenge of getting these laws implemented and enforced.

The need for legal reform arose in other contexts, too, but so did law’s limitations. For every comment I heard about the utility of Article 14 of CEDAW (or some other progressive national or international law) and the importance of legal and policy environments that were conducive to women’s empowerment, I also heard words of caution about the limits of law. Government and UN officials were more likely to tout the power of law, while NGOs were more likely to focus on village realities that often undermine the rule of law. Among those offering caveats regarding the potency of law were those who noted that many will be reluctant to invoke it—including criminal laws—in relation, for example, to forced child marriage. (Photo above left: Marta Santos Pais, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Violence against Children, center, on a panel about forced child marriage; left is a victim of child marriage). One African NGO representative stated,

Face reality ... be honest. Even in America, who tells the law? Maybe [the victims and their families] are illiterate ... [child marriage] is their custom. Who goes to tell the law except the child? And how can the child go tell the law?

This is where all of us come in ... if your NGO is interested in solving these problems. You go [to the village], watch the ways things are done and then talk to the educated locals [so that they begin to see the social and economic costs of the practice, e.g., child marriage]. And they will know they must do something.

This woman, like many others I heard over three days, extolled the importance of grassroots efforts to achieving the empowerment of women.

Wherever one might strike the balance between formal law on the one hand and local, grassroots efforts to educate and achieve cultural change on the other, few coming out of CSW 56 would dispute that both have significant roles in empowering not only rural women, but indeed all women.

Originally posted to Jurist.org; cross-posted to IntLawGrrls, Agricultural Law, and UC Davis Faculty Blog.

Opening Day of UN's Commission on the Status of Women: Focus on rural women

The following post was written by Lauren McIntosh, a third-year law student at Pace University. Lauren and I are two of the observers designated by the American Society of International Law to attend the United Nation's 56th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Rural women are a focus of the 56th Session, which means that agriculture is, too.

Monday marked the beginning of the 56^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW56) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. This year’s priority theme is the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development, and other current challenges. This theme seems more relevant than ever now that the world’s population has exceeded 7 billion (expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050), with rural women making up one-fourth of the population.

The Honorable Marjon V. Kamara of Liberia, the Chair of CSW56, opened the session in the General Assembly Hall with the delegates from the Member States of the United Nations and representatives and observers from national, regional, and local organizations in attendance. During her opening statement, Kamara emphasized that much normative work on gender equality remains to be done in the political realm at the international level, and actual implementation at the national level is also a major task. This includes bridging the gap between the promises made at the international level and their implementation at the national level; thus, the real work begins after CSW56 when the delegates return to their home countries. Furthermore, she stated that the goal of gender equality is not a task to be undertaken only by women, but it is the responsibility of society as a whole to work towards achieving this goal.

We also had the honor of hearing from Michelle Bachelet, the first Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of U.N. Women and the former President of Chile (photo above). She stressed that the session’s priority theme is pressing as it includes issues relating to human rights, equality, and justice for a quarter of the world’s population; furthermore, empowering rural women is not just good for women, but advances the interests of all members of society. Although they are often overlooked, rural women are actually on the front lines of many pressing global issues, such as climate change and its effects on agriculture. The Arab Spring and other such movements have also shown us that we must open up the political process to all members of society, especially rural women. Strides have been made, and more women now work and participate in politics at the international, national, and local level, but this is not enough, as rural women also need economic independence. In this realm, Bachelet noted, rural women have seen less progress. For example, women farmers receive only five percent of agricultural extension services. She also quoted a rural woman who expressed another challenge:

When the land is in my husband’s name, I’m only a worker. When it is in my name, I have some position in society.

One especially interesting point raised by Bachelet was the important role a cell phone can play in the life of a rural woman, as it is a means to acquire services and carry out business. A recent study showed that 41 percent of women reported an increase in income and professional opportunities because of their cell phones. Ultimately, in order to achieve economic independence, rural women need better access to basic infrastructure and technology. Bachelet concluded by stating:

I know that equality is possible. It will take time. It will take our concerted and collective effort. But I am convinced that if we put our energies into empowering women and advancing gender equality, we will create a new and better future.

As both Kamara and Bachelet emphasized in launching CSW56, much work lies ahead. After this encouraging start, the delegations, observers, and attendees moved on to smaller group discussions, roundtables, and panels to get on with that important work.

Cross posted to Agricultural Law and IntLawGrrls.

My publications about CEDAW's Article 14, which is entirely about the rights of rural women, are here, here, and here.