RURAL Canadian consumers of urban-based media will be familiar with the dreary pattern.
Agriculture and rural Canada are covered as: a) money-sucking welfare economies; b) an easy hit when a heart-rending story about cash-strapped farmers fighting the bank or the government is required; or c) the occasional good-news story about a heroic family defying the odds by doing something creative, inventive or profitable.
Meanwhile, most non-nostalgic columnists have been beating the drum about the decline of the rural economy, the growing irrelevance of farming and all the money this small loser group gets and the general eclipse of a once-vibrant part of Canada.
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One Toronto-based columnist regularly dismisses rural Canada as an economic, social and intellectual backwater in comparison to cities that are not only the future but also the real wealth generators in Canada, one of the world’s most urbanized societies. Rural Canada survives only because of subsidy and protection.
The implication is that, beyond the museum effect of remembering our ancestors, the nation could do without it.
Sadly, that down-your-nose view of farmers and rural economies has hardly been confined to Canada.
Worldwide, tenured academics and comfortable bureaucrats and politicians looking for urban votes have had the same view. The contributions of rural areas to the high tech go-go 20th and 21st century economies are like the contributions of the buggy whip to Henry Ford’s empire.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
If there was one common theme in Rome last week at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization world summit on the crisis of rising food prices and growing hunger, it was that the world has denigrated and neglected agriculture at its peril.
Suddenly, there is not enough affordable food, urbanites have rioted in more than 20 countries, governments may fall and civil unrest is guaranteed. And the deep thinkers are wondering: how did this happen? The world has been awash in food.
Well, subsidized food maybe, but paying farmers to sell cheap food at a loss is not a long-term strategy. Deliberately withholding money from investment in agricultural research, technology development and infrastructure because urban industrial parks and high tech campuses were the future is a short-term strategy.
“For 30 years, governments, aid donors and development agencies have neglected agriculture,” the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said last week. “The sector was seen as backward, unproductive and a poverty trap. The result is a shocking investment deficit that will take years to recover.”
After the 1974 world food crisis, many pious promises were made. However, between 1980 and 2005, aid and investment in developing world agriculture fell to $3.4 billion from $8 billion. Loans dried up.
The theory was that if a backward agricultural country can’t feed itself because its inefficient small-scale farmers are being driven into the city, there’s lots of cheap subsidized grain or food aid. The FAO is filled with cries from 150 countries: agriculture matters, it needs attention.
Assuming no relapse, this may be the most positive outcome of the current food panic: the realization that supermarkets, traders and aid agencies do not grow food.
Farmers do.
