Rural and Community Prosperity
A COSSA Congressional Seminar
As Congress debated the next Farm bill, a
distinguished panel of researchers briefed Congressional and agency staff,
researchers, and practitioners on the findings of recent research on building rural
and community prosperity on July 20 in Washington.
Before introducing the speakers, Janet Bokemeier, Associate
Director of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station and Professor of
Sociology at Michigan State University, prefaced the speakers’ remarks by
commenting on the character of rural communities, and the significant
differences between them.
Rural areas, she said, differ in their relationship to
agriculture, their economic vitality, their access to health care, social
services, and education, and their ability to respond to opportunities. Given such variation, Bokemeier submitted,
how can different communities develop social capacity?
Building Social Capacity
Communities with high social capacity, explained Cornelia
Flora, Professor of Agriculture at Iowa State University and Director of the
North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, are able to involve
diverse perspectives to look at alternatives, have strong internal and external
networks, and can mobilize financial, human, technical, and information
resources to get things done.
Flora found that such places were more able than others to
create new private sector jobs and income.
Flora’s work also demonstrated that high social capacity is essential to
the success of, for example, a community’s ability to protect the quality of
their drinking water.
What communities with high social capacity have in common,
Flora found, are intervention and investment.
Specific methods of building this capacity include providing community
spaces where residents can interact and learn to trust each other, and
cooperative extension, which brings together diverse groups and interests to
discuss opportunities for investment and cooperation.
Flora cited one such program that involved planning a local
transportation system. The program was
resisted by the experts, who said the roads would be fine so long as there is a
good engineer. But what the expertise
did not consider, Flora explained, is “what kind of road makes sense for this
place, where are the appropriate places to put it, and how can we do this in
ways that don’t put us in court?”
Prosperity and Rural Families
Turning to the people who live in rural areas, Diane
McLaughlin, Professor of World Sociology and Demographics at Pennsylvania State
University and Associate at the Population Research Institute, focused on rural
families and their prospects for prosperity.
Rural families’ vision of prosperity, according to McLaughlin,
includes better jobs with higher earnings and benefits, and the ability to
continue to live in a small town or the
open country. Various factors, however,
limit the opportunities for some families to improve their prosperity.
These include poverty and low income, limited access to
community resources like good jobs, schools, and services, limited access to
external resources, and limited opportunity to participate in decisions that
affect them. Scientists’ ability to
measure some of these factors, McLaughlin noted, depends on the Census and the
American Community Survey (see Update, July 30, 2001).
One family dynamic revealed by research is the increase in
female-headed families in rural areas which, she said, contributes to the high
poverty rates, “a clear example of the interaction between demographic change
and family prosperity.”
McLaughlin discussed two
other main factors besides poverty that are challenges to the prosperity of
rural families. The first is youth risk
behavior and youth outmigration.
Although rural youth face many of the same risks as their urban
counterparts (e.g., drugs and teen pregnancy), counseling and social services
are less available in rural areas. Lack
of quality jobs, she suggested, may contribute to the debilitating outmigration
of youth. McLaughlin called for more
research on the role of families, schools, and communities in youth risk
behaviors, strategies to help youth avoid risk, and demographic change and youth
retention strategies.
The final main challenge
McLaughlin identified is the concentration of elders in some parts of rural
America. “Aging in place” elders are
more likely to be faced with poverty and minimal health, social, and
transportation services.
Economic Development Options
Building on the
observations of the other speakers, Michael Woods, Professor of Agricultural
Economics at Oklahoma State University, tackled the issue of how to promote
economic development, given the challenges faced by rural communities.
Woods identified three
pillars that enable a community to develop.
First, it needs a diverse, resilient economy that does not depend on one
sector. Second, it needs an
infrastructure of services and facilities, which includes access to the digital
infrastructure. Finally, Woods said, a
community needs informed, trained leaders.
Woods discussed some of
the research-based tools that extension offices employ to help communities
develop their capacity, drawing on their particular strengths. For example, demographic analysis can help a
community better understand where their income comes from, what they can expect
from demographic trends, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Economic impact analysis can predict the
effects of enhancing tourism or opening a small manufacturing plant.
Woods described the
experience of Sulfur, Oklahoma, which won support to expand its national
recreation area. They achieved this
with the help of an economic impact analysis of tourism and their positive
relationship with the federal employees.
Such development, he said, demonstrates the importance of both
research-based initiatives and external linkages.
Public Policy Implications
Tying the speakers’
comments together was Charles (Chuck) Fluharty of the Rural Policy Research
Institute. Fluharty said that the
strengths of rural communities that the speakers discussed must be integrated –
particularly diversity, community and family capacity, and entrepreneurship.
The public policy
challenge in exploiting diversity, he said, is integrating local actions with
the state and federal levels. Key here,
he continued, is community-based public policy and the importance of
place. The public policy challenge in
enhancing entrepreneurship is finding a structure that enhances and links both
public and private entrepreneurship, and moves agriculture policy away from
dependency to empowerment.
Also in the realm of
public policy, Fluharty emphasized the importance of policy flows from the
Federal government. Unfortunately, he said,
there is little understanding at the federal level of important differences
between the urban and the rural. But,
he qualified, we have the research capacity to bring this understanding to the
committees and jurisdictions in Washington.
Fluharty’s comments
culminated in three public policy recommendations. First, though he is excited about the current Farm bill’s
community capacity component, its funding level is too low, he said, and should
be more substantial. He also called for
a large commitment to broadband technology.
Finally, he said, the
basic research commitment to rural data, information, and decision support is
lacking. “It is absolutely critical,”
he said, that the American Community Survey moves forward “if we are going to
get good data for informed decisionmaking in rural America.”