Rural trappings and urban trends

Non-functioning old cars left in front yards has come up multiple times in our discussions of the rural this semester. A few weeks ago I thought about those abandoned old vehicles when I visited Flora Grubb Gardens, a hipstery, landscape design center in San Francisco. Located off of a rather busy street, Flora Grubb is a green haven amidst the concrete of the city. The old warehouse is overflowing with air plants and ferns, mosses and succulents, not to mention rustic outdoor furniture and vertical gardens. The center (it is more of a center than a store) is also complete with a Ritual Coffee shop and high-end yard furniture. While I can't afford anything there, I enjoy the place. However, the thing that really caught my eye when I visited, was an old truck in the yard that had been transformed into a porch, complete with steps leading into the bed, where a table and chairs invited guests to read the paper and sip their coffee. I immediately thought of Law and Rural Livelihood and began to contemplate the ways that rural trappings have become adopted as urban trends.

Growing up in a family of garage-sale addicts and junk-yard junkies, I am pretty accustomed to buying used, recycling, and refurbishing. For my father, it has become an art-form (collecting) and my parents' house is almost entirely furnished and decorated with other people's old things that have been "reinvented" to some degree. As I have grown older, I have adopted his habits and embraced the art of the yard sale. Over the last few years, in my pursuits of hidden treasure, I have noticed the increased number of people at Urban Ore and used furniture shops popping up in Bay Area neighborhoods. This is not to say that people haven't been buying used and collecting things for decades, but my sense is that it's growing in popularity. I recently walked into Zonal, a furniture store in Hayes Valley, with piles of used furniture, many with weathered wood and chipped paint. I asked the owner where he got his stock and he replied that he drives a van across the country collecting pieces, most of which come from the middle of the country. By the looks of his collection, I wonder how much of it was acquired in small rural towns, likely for a small fraction of the price he was selling them for in the City.

A good friend of mine recently became engaged and is in full wedding-planing mode. Of course, wedding venues are the hot topic of discussion, and in our conversations about potential sites for the nuptials, we waded into the subject of the cost of sites. I recommended that she just find a barn and get married there, to which she responded: "Barns are expensive. Everyone is getting married in barns these day!" I guess I wasn't so surprised, but it triggered a google search and sure enough, websites on barn weddings, even a one-stop barn locater site, with barns in various states. One customer bride-to-be, commented that getting married in a barn "symbolizes a sense of peace and oneness with the land that harmonizes well with the idea of a wedding." While this might be true, and clearly she is entitled to her thoughts, it gets me thinking about the way we view the rural and symbols that we associate with the rural. As a Denver Post article put it, "popular culture can't seem to get enough of rural Americana." And as Patrick Gottsch, founder of Rural Media Group, exclaimed, "It's cool to be rural now."

The Urban farming movement is growing, but it is not without its controversy. While it is helping some urban residents have more control over their food, is it also harming traditional farmers in rural areas of the country? While I view the practice as both a sign of respect for farming communities and the farming lifestyle, I also see that in many ways it is a privilege for for only certain urban communities. Then, as we all know, there are the clothing and food trends that can arguably be traced to a fascination of rural culture (and which I take part in as well, I must admit).

My question is: Are we romanticizing the rural? Are we using the stereotypes and trappings as we wish, without recognizing the issues facing rural communities in this country?

Democratist manifesto

Representative Paul Ryan's GOP budget proposal for 2012, titled "The Path to Prosperity," would impose spending cuts unprecedented in size. The plan is unlikely to be enacted wholesale because the Democrats still control the Senate, but it definitely sets a tone and a starting point for future negotiations. Admittedly, the nation's debt crisis is severe and reform is necessary, but the breadth of the proposed cuts are staggering. Five trillion dollars over the next decade would be slashed from the budget, much of it from Medicare and Medicaid in spite of the fact that in 2006 the U.S. ranked 39th in the world for infant mortality, 43rd for adult female mortality, 42nd for adult male mortality, and 36th for life expectancy. (The U.S. also ranked first in healthcare spending per capita according to the previously linked article, so we clearly have some efficiency issues. That is, prices may be too high, and spending per capita might be skewed upward by very high health care expenditures for the richest Americans, etc. Nevertheless, I don't think cutting spending for the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens is going to achieve better results per healthcare dollar spent.)

Unfortunately, those rankings are probably going to get worse if funding for Medicare and Medicaid are cut significantly. And if this is where Republicans are starting from, on top of vowing to repeal "Obamacare," healthcare quality certainly isn't going to improve, no matter how much the Democrats chip away at the GOP plan. So we'll have to be content with the status quo, which, for example, features an infant mortality rate for non-whites in Mississippi of over 18 per 1,000 live births- about the same as Libya and Thailand. (The Kaiser Family Foundation data, which is from 2004-06, lists an even higher Mississippi infant mortality rate for blacks and Hispanics, of over 21 per 1000 live births.)

By GDP, the United States is far and away the world's richest country, almost three times as wealthy as second-ranked China and nearly as rich as the entire European Union (The U.S. ranked sixth in GDP per capita, using the IMF data). But we are also one of the most unequal countries in terms of income and wealth distribution, with a Gini coefficient ranking us among the most unequal of all developed countries (sort this linked chart by "UN Gini" in order to see the ranking). The U.S is the only industrialized nation without some form of universal health coverage for its citizens, which makes the country even more unequal: health is a good- one that many poor people can't afford, but wealthy people can. So much for the social contract.

Could we do something to reverse this slide into a Dickensian dystopia assuming enough of us wanted to? I'm not sure. I'm not convinced that significant reform is actually just a matter of political will. Author and activist Noam Chomsky argues in his book "Understanding Power" (at page 62 if you have access to the book), that real power does not lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy. Chomsky contends that even if a vast majority of the populace elected a government that enacted sweeping reforms to benefit the populace at the expense of the very rich, the result would be a massive outflow of investment and the economy would grind to a halt- a process known as "capital flight" or "capital strike."

Capital flight might sound far-fetched, but there are many examples of its occurence, even in very developed countries like the United Kingdom. When Brazil elected left-leaning former union leader "Lula" da Silva as president in 2002, "fear of socialism spurred a flight of capital, which drove down the exchange rate and... Brazilian bonds found no buyers, credit ratings plunged, and it seemed the country might default on its huge foreign debt." It is worth noting that, according to the same article, Lula did not turn out to be quite the socialist he was made out to be; whether that was good or bad for the poor people of Brazil is probably an open question, worthy of its own blog post or even research paper. The point is simply that capital flight can be a very strong deterrent to government action that inflicts too much pain on businesses and the wealthy.

Chomsky hypothesizes (although it seems so apparent that it might as well be an observation) that if one of the states were to substantially increase business taxes, even if most of the population supported it, business would run a public relations campaign, saying truthfully, that if you soak the rich, capital will flow elsewhere and you're not going to have any jobs. The rich have to be happy first, and then the rest of us might get something.

That very P.R. campaign mentioned in Chomsky's hypothetical is currently being waged full force against President Obama to eliminate even the possibility of his support for populist policies. The president is no socialist radical reformer by any means. Obama has lowered taxes, not raised them, in spite of what people believe. Obama's healthcare reforms, vilified as as a socialist nightmare, are actually pretty weak. He left Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner in their positions at the Federal Reserve even though they helped precipitate the recent financial crisis by allowing investment banks and mortgage brokers to operate virtually unregulated. (Please see the movie "Inside Job" if you have time, it's a really compelling explanation of the financial crisis.) Obama has also remained silent while Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor he hired to put together the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau up and running, was demonized by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Obama is not even going to push for tighter regulation of the big banks in spite of the havoc they have wreaked, much less turn the country into a socialist state, or create death panels, or repeal the Second Amendment, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

But that's not the description of Obama that you hear. The rhetoric from the right, including Republican elected officials and candidates, is as extreme as it gets. Aside from presidential "candidate" Donald Trump's birther claims (apparently he has hired investigators in Hawaii), Rep. Michelle Bachmann stated that "we have seen President Obama usher in socialism under his watch for the last two years," and "Obamacare is the crown jewel of socialism." Business lobbyists, in spite of huge gains in profits, spread fear that Obama is creating an "anti-business" climate (a pro-business climate is just code for lower taxes). Fox News, in the run-up to the 2008 election, linked Obama to socialism at least 35 times according to the website Media Matters. And here's some stuff Glenn Beck said. It's no wonder that more than half of likely voters think that the word 'socialist' describes Obama accurately. The P.R. scare campaign is definitely on, and whether they make it explicit or not, the plutocrats, through their media and Washington mouthpieces, are sending a message: Do not f**k with us.

Our options for fighting back may be limited. We can support the less reactionary of the two business parties, a.k.a. the Democrats, and hope to pass reforms that may not be revolutionary, but at least provide more support for our tired, our poor, and our huddled masses than they currently receive. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats enacted the New Deal reforms, for example, which significantly improved circumstances for the poor and unemployed of the time in spite of the fact that it angered some powerful people so much that they tried, but thankfully failed, to overthrow FDR in a coup d'etat. The New Deal illustrates that successes within our form of government are certainly achievable. And the Europeans have enacted a wide range of populist social policies within capitalist frameworks, although government plays a more dominant role in the control of capital in Europe than in America.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure another New Deal is possible here today. In the 1930's, capital could not flow as freely as it does now in deregulated financial markets, so the threat of capital flight is a very potent weapon. The rich don't need to plot coups anymore either- the sophistication and scope of the modern media facilitate unrelenting attacks on any politician who dares lean too far to the left. Anti-communism is the national religion, and the political consequences of failing to kneel before the altar are severe. So, even if reform is possible, it will always be limited to just how benevolent the possessors of economic power choose to be.

But maybe one day (although I don't know how), if we gain popular control of what is produced in this country, with workers and communities in control of industry, and extend the democratic system to economic power- then we would have true democracy. We could enact policies that put the people first,without being effectively vetoed by capital strike. Ironically, worker control of industry- what we call communism- is not antithetical to democracy, but essential to it. Viva la Revolucion.

Whose baby is it anyway? On rural Indian women and surrogacy arrangements

Medical tourism is the new upper-class endeavor du jour. There is even a blog detailing medical tourism, and it boldly asserts the following:

India has become the top international surrogacy destination for couples and even single men and women who have not been able to have children through natural means. The success of the procedure in India, is greatly attributed to the cutting edge technology adopted by the fertility clinics in India, highly qualified fertility specialists, social acceptance of surrogacy, and low cost of surrogacy, all leading to India’s high success rate in gestational surrogacy.

Well, that's good to know, but what hides behind the shining surface of this phenomenon? Read this article in Marie Claire for a good primer on the issues.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Sinclair, Marie Claire

As Professor Seema M. Mohapatra explained at the 2011 Feminist Legal Theory Conference at the University of Baltimore School of Law's Center on Applied Feminism, there are several dangers in the phenomenon of international gestational surrogacy. We know that surrogacy is a complicated medical procedure, which is is highly dangerous for the surrogate. But Prof. Mohapatra was talking about the dangers of women's subjugation, oppression, and objectification that is attendant to international surrogacy. Due Indian public mores, the women who participate in the surrogacy business there are segregated in closed facilities for the duration of their pregnancies, monitoried closely, receiving only the nutrition provided by the center. Women who participate in surrogacy programs must be mothers (they must have had at least one live birth) --- and this means that the surrogate mothers are removed from their families for over 9 months.

Even more problematically, these women receive payments that allows them to buy a  house and provide for the education for their children in exchange of their services --- an amount so large it would easily cloud any reasonable person's judgment.  Prof. Mohapatra argues that the disparities in global living standards allow for the oppression of poor women in the Global South, because getting $2000 for a woman who is making $20 a month is a coercive amount of money. That is an offer that cannot be refused.

As Prof. Mohapatra states:

[T]hose who serve as surrogates are often those in the poorest, least educated, and lowest classes of Indian society.

Needless to say, rural women of India are the primary participants of this scheme, and thus, the uneven economic development and spatial inequality hits rural Indian women once more. Not only do they suffer from lower per-capita income, higher rates of illiteracy, more distance from health services, than their urban counterparts, but their bodies are increasingly viewed as merely a vessel for a white woman's future child. To add insult to injury, the surrogacy providers in India charge a premium for having a "Caucasian" egg fertilized and implanted in the Indian women's womb -- as if Indian women were not "Caucasian" already.  This systematic devaluation of women's bodies and even their ova is incensing to this feminist blogger.

The abstract of Prof. Mohapatra's paper can be accessed by clicking here.

Are poor rural whites a cultural minority?

In examining the cultural backdrop of persistent poverty counties (re: PPC Blog), it became evident that persistent poverty in rural areas is often heavily associated with the oppression of a minority group within that area. Usually this oppression results from the racial stratification of power but two of the regions overwhelmingly affected by rural persistent poverty are populated primarily by white households; Appalachia and parts of the upper highlands of the south or also known as the lower Ozarks of the Appalachia (Arkansas, Missouri and eastern Oklahoma). The experience of the multi-generational impoverished whites in these two areas repeatedly begs the question of whether rural white poor people can be distinguished from the dominant white majority as their own cultural, or even "racial", demographic.

What else defines whether a group is a racial or cultural minority? Generally, a cultural minority might have a shared history or experience, possibly a shared language or dialect and sometimes a shared locational similarity. Race can be further defined as sharing a common racial or ethnic identity or heritage. It may be hard to distinguish white rural poor people as their own racial minority. White poor rural poor people still share the racial identity and heritage of the white majority and though some historical examples support poor white persons as their own race (as discussed later), it may be more appropriate to consider rural poor whites as their own oppressed cultural, not racial,minority.

Myrtle Reul of Michigan State University brings attention to an array of rural poor minorities of diverse races in her book The Territorial Boundaries of Rural Poverty (1974) including recognizing the struggles of the mobile migrant rural poor populations and forgotten white poor populations outside of Appalachia, like minority religion Amish or Mennonite poor populations. Within politics of power and oppression, racial minorities are restricted from power and access to resources through oppression by the dominant race or class. Acknowledging this pattern, Reul describes that poor rural whites could be considered a minority in and of themselves because the "whites who live in rural poverty..are isolated from full participation in the dominant society."(pg.182)

If lack of access to participation defines majority/minority status, then impoverished rural whites, especially with spatial isolation as a common trait of rurality, could be viewed as a minority group based on their heavily oppressed access to the resources and powers enjoyed by the dominant group.

My home state of Oklahoma is one of the less than half of the states in the country to include persistent poverty counties. Unlike the other PPC regions, Oklahoma lacks a solid cohesive historical experience to easily define what cultural oppressions led to such generational persistent poverty. The persistently poor counties in Oklahoma are mostly in the eastern edge of the state.

Like most of Oklahoma, these areas have been drastically affected by both the forced relocation of Native Americans and the Land Rush that opened up Oklahoma to settlement by what was usually the poorest of poor whites. Alvin Turner, in his historical essay in Alternative Oklahoma:Contrarian Views of the Sooner State (Joyce 2007), describes the complicated histories of Native American oppression specific to the Oklahoma counties in question (pg.156). These stories of genocide and assimilation are similar to the rest of the experiences of tribal persons across Oklahoma, and this racial experience certainly contributes to the persistent poverty of the area. But Native American populations are spread throughout the entire state, and the PPC experience is limited only to the eastern edge of the state.

The counties in question shared a similar southern share cropper history more closely related to neighboring southern states than the rest of Oklahoma as evident from old agricultural maps in The Geography of Poverty by Richard Morrill of the University of Washington (1971,pg.119-138). This agricultural experience could be the cause of the mostly white persistent poverty in this area. As well, these counties are located in one of the parts of Oklahoma that experiences spatial location due to the Ouachita mountain range. Like their isolated Ozarkian and Appalachian peers, these counties experience the deprivation of isolation associated with persistent poverty and are also mostly comprised of white populations.

These counties also share a common history amongst the rural white populations, a history that includes their previous generations being considered white "racial minorities". In an earlier compilation by Joyce titled An Oklahoma I had Never Seen Before (1994) numerous scholars discuss the history of Scotch Irish settlement in Oklahoma, especially the eastern counties (pg.6). One of these contributors, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is a UC academic and longtime activist,feminist, and historian. In most of her books, including RedDirt and Outlaw Woman, Ortiz uses her mixed ancestry family as an example of the multiple racial experiences of poor rural Oklahomans. Specifically, she often speaks to the shared cultural experience and oppression, the shared dialect, language and appearance and share identity and history of Scotch Irish poor whites who were allowed to colonize what Native American land was left during the early 1900s. This provides one example of how poor rural whites in the past have been socially viewed as their own "racial" minorities.

Even Oklahomans descended from the white minorities who have since shed their country of origin accents and other "racial" markers over generations, can still experience social isolation or stereotyping as "Okies." "Okies" could be considered a white cultural minority in the least, if not even possibly a racial minority due to the shared identification, relocation and oppression of poor Oklahoma rural white populations during the Dust Bowl.

All of these examples coupled with the overwhelmingly shared experiences of rural white poor people despite the specific location of their experience strongly encourage that the rural poor white experience is one so limiting and unique that it should be differentiated from the experience of the rest of the white majority population.

The racial and cultural experience of persistent poverty

In a report issued by the Economic Research Service branch of the USDA, a persistent poverty county is defined as county in which 20% or more of the population were living in poverty for the last thirty years according to census data. Using this definition, there are currently 386 persistent poverty counties in the US, and 340 of them are in counties that are also codified as being "nonmetro." The report mentions the link between rural poverty and race, as well as noting the lack of PPC(persistent poverty county) saturation in the West, Midwest and Northeast. Emphasizing the number of rural PPCs in the South, for brevity's sake or otherwise, the report fails to recognize the similarities of all the rural PPCs across the country. Despite being more scattered in areas other than the densely packed PPCs in the South, the histories of the rural populations living in such multi-generational poverty share common themes of racial and cultural oppression that grossly affect the economies of entire regions of the country.

The ignorance to the shared cultural oppression of rural PPCS evident in the USDA report reflects a general trend in media and scholarly attention primarily focusing upon urban poverty. A good example of this indifference to rural poverty is this quote from the "Who are the poor?" chapter of the book Persistent Poverty (1991) by Richard Roper of Southern Utah University:

Poverty remains a predominantly urban problem, if for no other reason than the fact that 75% of the general population lives in urban areas (pg.51).

Roper then goes on to briefly describe rural poverty trends and summarizes his only section on the rural poor by blaming rural poverty on economic challenges while mostly avoiding discussing the cultural oppressions of the populations facing such "economic insecurity plagues(pg.53)."
I would challenge that persistent poverty represents the results of the "relative" poverty experienced due to the oppression of generations of the same populations within each rural region; and, that this kind of persistent poverty experience is actually of the utmost concern in poverty eradication efforts because,as the USDA report clarifies, 88% of PPCs are in rural areas. The Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty differentiates between different states of poverty in the book Persistent Poverty in Rural America (1993).  Poverty is defined as being experienced as both a "relative" and "absolute" state.  (p. 138)          

Absolute poverty is described as a

material deprivation to such an extent that one's physical well being is at risk. Extreme material deprivation leads not only to physical degradation but mental despair...Poverty usually entails the unjust loss of choice in one's culture or functional lifestyle(pg.138).

Relative poverty is then defined as the experience of poverty resulting from the structural experience of social conditions that limit income and livelihood, such as structural economic and racial oppression (i.e., racial minorities earn less than whites). Both kinds of poverty result from and further contribute to the powerlessness of people within the social stratification of power and access to resources. A strong distinction is made that while absolute poverty can be affected by individual circumstantial changes; relative poverty can not be remedied without creating vast changes to the power class structures that control the overall distributions of resources in our society.

The Task Force continues to develop an image of the complicated nature of rural persistent poverty through determining that beyond absolute and relative, poverty also represents deprivations other than the deprivation of income and earning capacity traditionally associated with definitions of poverty(pg.174). The experience of deprivation in poverty is multidimensional and includes the deprivation of safety, increased cultural oppression and increased denial of opportunity, among other challenges faced by rural PPC populations. The Task Force emphasizes that racial oppression magnifies and is usually linked to the deprivations of persistent poverty.
Calvin Beale, one of the researchers for the USDA's Economic Research Service, articulates in his contribution to the book Poverty and Race in America (2006) that in most counties where the incidence of poverty is above 20%, the majority of those 20% poor are of minority races(pg.72). If that if that is not the case then, it is the high incidence of poverty amongst the minorities within the dominant population that pushes the percentiles beyond 20% for each county (pg.72). Beale then goes on to describe the racial demographics of traditionally poorest regions of the country (pg.72-74). The introduction to the study Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty (Pickering 2006) further develops the story behind the accumulations of red counties on the USDA PPC map (pg.1-2).

The southern PPCs result from the history of slavery and racial oppression of African American populations. PPCs in the west, southwest and parts of the plains states include Native American populations experiencing generations of relative poverty, cultural and physical genocide and the experience of the deprivation of life resulting from the reservation system. The populations living in persistent poverty in Texas are mostly comprised of Latino communities oppressed by the economics and inequalities of border-towns. The remaining heavy cluster of PPCs is found in Appalachia where communities have also been generation-ally oppressed by the dominant powers. In Appalachia however, the poor persons are more often white communities struggling against the results of the extraction industry and mining towns.
Evident in the shared history of oppression amongst the majority of all PPCs remains a need to address the structural element of relative poverty. Relative poverty keeps these populations limited and powerless even if their absolute poverty can be mitigated in the short term. Can absolute poverty amongst such multi-generational oppressed groups even be eliminated at all without first acknowledging the systematic abuses that have created these pervasive experiences of relative poverty amongst rural minority groups? And then, what are the next steps in creating the structural changes necessary to start eradicating the relative persistent poverty of rural minority groups?

Rural feminist grassroots organizations, and CEDAW as an expressive document

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

On March 30, 2011, Professor Pruitt and I presented our upcoming paper at a symposium entitled Applying Feminism Globally, organized by the University of Baltimore School of Law's Center on Applied Feminism. Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison delivered the keynote address. Many of Toni Morrison's writings explored the situation of rural African American women, notably my favorite, Beloved.

Our paper and presentation discusses the special "disability" of rural places and especially the hardships that rural women endure in addition to their gender "handicap." But our paper intends to write on a rather positive note, uncovering how the much-maligned Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) emboldened feminist grassroots organization in four countries: Australia, Canada, China, and India.

We argue that CEDAW is not only a source of law, but also an expressive document that has inspired feminist activism around the world and helped raise women’s legal consciousness. CEDAW was the first U.N. treaty that specifically considered the rural-urban axis in its catalogue of human rights. CEDAW’s Article 14 recognizes rural women as a particularly disadvantaged group in need of additional guarantees of particular rights. Article 14 stipulates that rural women — like their urban counterparts — should enjoy the panoply of CEDAW rights: education, health care, and an array of civil and political rights. But Article 14 also enumerates for rural women rights to agriculture and development more generally. It includes, for example, the right for women to organize self-help groups and cooperatives, a right not enumerated elsewhere in relation to all women. Finally, Article 14 specifies for rural women a wider range of socioeconomic rights than is recognized elsewhere in CEDAW. These include rights to various types of infrastructure, including water, sanitation, electricity, transport and housing.

In our paper we examine the four Member States’ responses to their Article 14 commitments to empowering rural women, specifically regarding how Member States have encouraged and enabled self-organization by women. Member States’ periodic reports to the Division for the Advancement of Women indicate that their governments benefit from — and, indeed, seek to achieve rural women’s empowerment through — women’s grassroots activism, including via the local self-help groups and cooperatives envisioned by Article 14. We then consider several specific local women’s organizations, looking at how they benefit from CEDAW’s mandate (however weak a mandate it is) to encourage women’s self-organization. We thus begin to construct a portrait of the symbiotic relationship between top-down lawmaking and bottom-up activism to empower women. In short, we focus on CEDAW’s role not as an enforceable human rights treaty, but as an expressive document that has facilitated grassroots feminist organizing.

Farmer v. farm workers

Until my mid-teens, I thought “farmer” and “farm worker” were one and the same: I believed these two parties represented the same interests. Then, one year, when my hometown grew brown with drought, I started hearing rumblings in the community about farmers and fish. Sifting through the adult conversations around our local café I learned that the farms north of us, near Tule Lake and Yreka, and south of us in the Central Valley, called for more water from the dams, creeks, and rivers. On the other side of the equation; my home town called for preservation of the streams that kept tourists and fishermen coming back year after year. Through the snatches of derisive conversation I began to piece together impressions of farmers as large landholders who frequently exploited cheep immigrant labor at the expense of their right to a living wage. Like the reality of farmer/farm worker relations, the town opinions were by no means monolithic; however it became obvious that freeway signs reading “Farmers Feed America” were political tools that I should consider before carelessly agreeing with their seemingly innocuous stance.

Perhaps unsurprising to most of us, farmer interests frequently clash with a number of other group interests including agricultural employees. It seems America has sided with the farmers at the expense of the farm workers. Today only 1% of America calls themselves farmers, yet protections for these livelihoods are some of the strongest in the nation. The US Farm Bill, passed every 5 to 7 years, provides for subsidy payments to these landowners that between 1995 and 2009 amounted to $246.7 billion. Farm workers, on the other hand, receive little protection from the law. They have experienced historical animosity in the political arena and are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which protects certain employee rights, including the right to unionize. National legislation also neglects to provide farm employees with a minimum wage, leaving this area to the sole discretion of the state. Today, five states have yet to enact minimum wage standards for these workers. Other states, like Kansas, with a minimum wage of $2.65/hour, abysmally fail to protect worker rights.

Despite the structural disadvantages faced by agricultural employees, they continue to mount efforts to further their rights. Californians are familiar with Cezar Chavez’ work to establish the first agricultural employee union, The United Farm Workers of America, which has successfully brokered union contracts with industry leaders across the United States. Recently, a Florida based group, the Coalition for Imokalee Workers (CIW) won a long battle covered by the New York Times. Primarily composed of Hispanic, Mayan, and Haitian workers, CIW organizes employees in a unique strategy to raise tomato farm worker wages. The group first targeted large tomato purchasers like Burger King and McDonalds. They requested these companies agree to pay one cent more per pound to the producers so that farmers could pass those earnings on to their workers. When these companies caved to the grass root campaigns, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange prohibited farmers from distributing the extra money to their workers. This April, CIW reached an agreement with the trade association that allowed distributions of the increased earnings to workers as well as minimum labor standards. Even with the successes of United Farm Workers of America and CIW it is abundantly clear that farm employees continue to stand in extreme disadvantage in juxtaposition to their employers whose interests are served in national legislation.

Spatial challenges brought home

Over Spring Break, my wife and I flew to North Carolina to visit her sister, Michelle. Much to my allergy-ridden sweetheart’s chagrin, Michelle lives with her husband, Andy, and two-year-old daughter, Miriam, on a farm just outside Chapel Hill. Michelle and Andy are not full-time farmers (she is finishing up a PhD at Duke; he works for the local Catholic church), but they have enough time and space to fill their property with sheep, chickens, ducks, and rabbits. Add to that a pair of dogs to keep the sheep in line, plus a trio of cats to keep the place relatively vermin-free, and you end up with a place your average country mouse would love to call home. (Except for the cats, I suppose.)

Miriam loves it. Like many young children, she adores all things bleating, barking, quacking, and clucking, so she thrives in her own personal petting zoo. Whenever it’s time to do the chores, she does her best to help by hefting the bucket of dog food, following the chickens to make sure they’re okay, or pointing out (repeatedly) where the sheep are in the pasture.

Because Andy and Michelle did not have a Spring Break, my wife and I ended up taking care of Miriam while they were at work. Most of the time, this entailed reading stories and eating imaginary muffins, but at least once a day we tried to get her outside so she could run around in the fresh air. Given her affection for the animals outside her door, this was not difficult: on would slide her coat and boots, and out we’d go.

Usually, Miriam was content to show me her chickens and rabbits, or to throw rocks in the nearby duck pond and explain how this created ripples. One day, though, we decided to walk into the pasture to visit the sheep. Michelle and Andy had told me not to let Miriam get too close, as the flock had grown aggressive in protection of their newly born lambs, but I felt no real reason for concern as I opened the gate and entered with my little niece in hand. Her parents routinely took Miriam with them when they fed these animals, so I figured it would be fine as long as I watched her like a hawk. The sheep were a good distance away, and two large sheep dogs separated them from us, so we would just go in for a moment, pet the dogs, wave to the woolly grazers, and then leave.

After securing the latch behind us, however, I looked over to find the entire flock staring us down. They hadn’t moved closer, nor were they showing any indication of impending movement, but every single sheep had turned around to watch us. And they kept watching us, silently maintaining icy visual contact as the dogs came over to greet me and my diminutive companion. If it hadn’t happened on a farm, I would call it unnatural. In any event, it was one of the creepiest moments of my life, and the only time I’ve ever been afraid of sheep. The alpha male’s horns suddenly looked three feet long, and every sharp hoof seemed poised like an unopened switchblade. After only a few moments of obligatory dog-petting, I scooped Miriam up and asked her to show me her chickens again.

Which brings me to my point about spatial realities and their effect on rural life. Andy and Michelle’s farm happens to be a short drive from the UNC medical center, so if anything had actually happened – if the ovine menace had done more than merely loom over my niece – help was as close as in any urban setting. But what about truly rural environments? Andy and Michelle live on the outskirts of a major university town; what about farms on the outskirts of nowhere?

On the one hand, it certainly breeds a level of self-sufficiency unknown in places where resources are more readily accessible. On the other hand, though, it leads to a unique helplessness at the point where self-sufficiency is simply insufficient. Beyond the lack of medical attention, we’ve seen this in several different examples in this class: the person who has no car and can’t take the bus because there isn’t one; the abused woman with nowhere to run; the law enforcement vacuum filled by the local meth gang. In short, physical separation from resources has a profound effect on rural livelihoods. It is an obvious point, but one I’ll remember every time I put on a wool sweater.

Widening spatial inequality and what to do about it

Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago.

But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Between 2007 and 2009 real GDP per head in the five richest states actually rose by an average of 2%, but fell by 3% in the five poorest. Both groups outperformed the national average, a fall of more than 4%. (The biggest slumps, both by more than 10%, were in Michigan, the eighth-poorest state, and in Nevada, site of the biggest house-price crash.)

The Economist notes that this is merely a continuation of a long-standing trend, and it attributes the phenomenon, in part, to the "dependence of poorer states on manufacturing, which has suffered big job cuts over the past decade." The feature concludes that "the income gap between richer and poorer areas is likely to widen further as government-spending cuts disproportionately hurt less prosperous parts."

One of the story's big attention getters is its comparison of GDP among regions and cities of different nations.

[O]ver a quarter of regions in Britain and Italy and one-tenth of those in Germany will this year have a lower GDP per head than the municipality of Shanghai. All the American states remain richer, but Shanghai looks set to overtake Mississippi by 2015; within ten years half of all the states, including Florida, Michigan and Ohio, could have a GDP per head lower than Shanghai and Beijing.

If the comparison were at the scale of the county rather than that of the state, these Chinese cities would no doubt be shown well out-pacing our nation's persistent poverty counties.

The second Economist feature on spatial inequality, "Gaponomics," takes up the question of what should be done to respond to this problem, particularly in the context of Britain. Instead of investing in particular regions or giving tax breaks to "enterprise zones" in these downtrodden areas, The Economist offers this proposal:

[M]ake it easier for people to move. Given inherent gaps in regional productivity prospects, there is a case for boosting mobility from declining regions to prospering ones. In Britain the main problem is the fetish for home-ownership and high house prices in the south-east, partly the result of severe shortages of supply. Easing planning restrictions below the Watford Gap would be a better way of helping Britons than propping up the north.

As a ruralist, I am immediately suspicious of policies that would aggravate uneven development. Among other things, they ignore those who will remain immobile and inevitably left behind. They also ignore attachment to place as an aspect of the political economy of rural areas in particular.

This story's second proposal is far more palatable: invest in education because it results in "the single biggest reward" for the nation--even if northerners then move south with their enhanced human capital. (Regarding the latter, I am reminded of this book on the rural brain drain).

Indeed, a recent New York Times editorial echoes the second of these ideas in relation to New York's funding scheme for education. In "Rich District, Poor District," the editorial staff consider how two of the state's school districts will fare under the Cuomo budget: "Ilion in the economically depressed Mohawk Valley, and Syosset, a wealthy town in Long Island’s Nassau County. " Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture. Here' a summary:

The cuts would scarcely affect wealthy districts that rely primarily on local taxes to support lavishly appointed schools. But they would be catastrophic for impoverished rural districts that have been starved of state aid for decades and are still reeling from cuts levied last year .... Already struggling to furnish even basic course offerings, the poorest districts would need to cannibalize themselves to keep the doors open and the lights on.

As the editors express it, the $1.1 million cut Ilion is being asked to take to its $25 million budget "would not even come to a rounding error in the state's richest districts," like Syosset, which is being asked to absorb only a $1.4 million cut to its $188 million budget. But the New York Times editors aren't just arguing that school funding should be more equitable because "it's the right thing to do," they make an argument grounded in economics: Depressed regions like that around Illion "stand[ ] little chance of attracting high-skill jobs if [their] schools are allowed to deteriorate."

Going back to The Economist articles for a moment, I noted that enhanced investment in education is one reason for the income convergence across Germany, even as spatial inequalities become more acute in other nations. The story describes "huge national and European Union funds for infrastructure, R&D and education, as well as the transfer of some manufacturing jobs from factories in the western states to the east." For some reason, Germany sees reasons to take care of its citizens where they are--not to create incentives for residents of the less affluent East to move West. I'd like to know more about those reasons because I suspect they go beyond a sentimental desire to permit people to stay where they are and the attractive orderliness of a more evenly populated. I am guessing these policies are based in part on economic calculations about the value of existing infrastructure and human capital in the historically deprived East. Better understanding those reasons might inform debates in the United States about why regional development and reducing spatial inequalities--not fueling them--makes good sense from myriad perspectives.

Some of my writings mapping the socio-geographic concept of spatial inequality onto legal conceptions of (in)equality are here, here, and here.

Cross-posted to ClassCrits, SALTLaw.blog, and UC Davis Faculty Blog.