by Judith Bortner Heffernan
At its best, the rural United States is as picturesque as a New England village square, as quaint as a buggy-filled Amish community, as enchanting as a Gulfside fishing town, as awesome as the Midwest’s endless fields of grain, as macho as a western ranching town, as spectacular as mountain village along the Continental Divide, as varied as farming and small-manufacturing communities across the country, as filled with wonder as communities along the rivers and old-growth forests of the Northwest.
This is the diverse, beautiful panorama that accompanies the music of "America, the Beautiful."
But there is another side of the rural United States -- the not-for-postcards view. It includes:
Turning down less-traveled roads in nearly every state reveals tiny hamlets of invisible rural poor families. Pocket communities of multiethnic immigrants, many undocumented, can be found near upscale resorts, poultry and livestock slaughtering plants, and large corporate farming operations, which depend on a supply of reliable, low-wage labor.
If you follow a line of huge trucks down country roads, you often will arrive at a community that is the dump-site for toxic or urban waste.
This is not the America we think of when we sing, "God shed His grace on thee," nor the one whose good God crowned "with brotherhood from sea to shining sea." Rural U.S. communities are far more varied than most people in the country imagine. Like urban communities, they have experienced profound changes over the course of the last century. A story from my family illustrates part of this change.
In the winter of 1909, my husband's father was born in a sod house on the prairie of South Dakota to homesteading Methodist parents. When he died in 1993, our daughter -- his granddaughter -- rode in our car to his memorial service in rural Iowa writing an assignment on her battery-powered laptop computer. In the lifetime of this man, rural life in the U.S. heartland had gone from sod houses to cyberspace!
The cost of technology
Nearly every rural United Methodist Women unit has at least one member who can tell where she was when electricity finally got to her part of the countryside. While few rural women and men want to give up the technologies that have lessened the physical hardships of their work, most would acknowledge that the accompanying changes in social, political and cultural life have come at great cost. Consider for a moment, what has been happening in farming communities.
Until the early 1970s, producers of most agricultural commodities were primarily farm and ranch families dispersed across the country. They provided most of the labor, management and capital needed to operate their farming or ranching operations. These families lived on their land, made most of the decisions that affected their business operations and participated extensively in the life of their communities. They produced most of the food consumed in the United States and exported the rest into the world market.
The family-farm system of U.S. agricultural production was heralded as the best, most efficient system for the production of food and fiber. The quality and quantity of the commodities it produced, the educated and involved citizens it nurtured, the care of natural resources it fostered, and the local communities it sustained were widely envied.
In this system, farmers purchased the inputs necessary to raise crops and livestock from the numerous suppliers of seed, animals, equipment, feed and fertilizer. These suppliers competed for the farmers' business. When crops were harvested and livestock was ready to be sold, there were usually several markets competing to buy the farmers' production.
Much of the profit generated by the farms and the agricultural supply and marketing firms stayed in local communities and the surrounding regions, building up local economies. Such communities had vitality and so did their churches. Even as new technologies enabled families to farm and ranch more land, the family and the rural community remained central to agricultural production in the United States.
Onto this scene came the technological capability of producing thousands of chickens, eggs, and later, turkeys and hogs, in confined buildings. With this technology came economic and ideological justification for industrializing, then globalizing agriculture, following examples of other sectors of the economy.
Technology, like capital, is easily moved to parts of the world where production is cheaper. The political power needed to accomplish this was generated by the companies that stood to gain financially in cooperation with their colleagues in academia, in some farm organizations and in some financial institutions.
The complex economic, social, environmental and ethical consequences of making this profound change were downplayed, even disregarded, by supporters of this new system. The euphoria surrounding the notion of large-scale, high-tech, capital-intensive, specialized factory-like systems for producing first livestock, and now crops, seemed endless.
Without open public debate, the U.S. decentralized and competitive food-production system, which has provided abundant, secure, relatively inexpensive food, is being rapidly discarded. In its place is an industrialized, globalized system that is controlled by a shrinking number of transnational corporations. A handful of corporations dominate much of the world's food system from the ownership of patents for genetic material through the production, processing and marketing of crops and livestock into name-brand products.
These corporations are linked with other firms and cooperatives into organizations called by some "food-system clusters." These units have close to monopolistic power to determine:
This kind of power over the world's food supply motivated many to go to Seattle, Wash., last winter to protest at the World Trade Organization meetings and to Washington, D.C., this spring to inform the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund of their concerns.
In the face of such immense economic and political power in the food system and other sectors of the economy, people around the world believe the future of a healthy, sustainable planet; the possibility of achieving a fulfilling life with a dignified level of living for their families; and the opportunity to participate in a democratic society are in jeopardy.
Spiritual realities
Two painful and deeply spiritual realities are emerging. The first is that by its pervasiveness and power, the economic sector of global society is in the process of overwhelming the political and cultural sectors. Secondly, the values and ideologies that support this notion of economic organization are in profound conflict with the Christian Gospel.
In these emerging economic structures, everything becomes a commodity that is assigned value or no value based on its economic profitability. People, communities, institutions, environments and cultures are seen as valuable only when they can be used by the corporations. Nothing has intrinsic, God-given value.
For people of faith and conviction, including those whose salaries or pensions come from such structures and/or who use and appreciate products made in such a system, identifying this conflict is troubling. How can people of faith accept the values and ideologies of the emerging global economic system and still espouse with conviction that the earth is the Lord's, that we are God's stewards placed here to cultivate and care for it, that we are all created in God's image, that all are to benefit from the abundance, that we are required by God to relate justly with all peoples and to live in community -- in shalom -- with them, and that God loved us so much that God became one of us to redeem us from our brokenness and separation from God.
Around the world, food is becoming a lightening rod of concern about the changing economy. The necessity of food to daily human life, its centrality to shared family experiences, its connectional and ceremonial importance in social and cultural life, and the sacredness of its symbolic spiritual value to people of every faith separate it from other sectors of the economy.
Women’s lives are often entwined with food production and preparation. From the time they first helped set the table, prepare a meal, plant a garden or shop for groceries, food has been key in their lives. Nursing babies, celebrating holidays, kneeling for Communion -- all are focused on food. Food is much more than a commodity. Food is spiritual.
How food is produced has become a major moral, ethical and social justice issue for people of faith. U.S. farmers and ranchers are being forced off their land by low commodity prices and structural changes. Many who remain are consuming their equity and struggling.
Despair is palpable in many rural places. Farmers are being told they are not needed because their land has higher market value for recreational, commercial or other purposes. In poorer nations, people are expected to raise food for export to wealthier nations, even though they have insufficient food to feed their own families.
Stewardship concerns arise about the long-term sustainability of the land and the aquifers when farming is pursued solely to maximize immediate returns. Confined livestock production raises questions about preservation of genetic diversity, the human health consequences of creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria in confined animals, and environmental concerns around vast quantities of waste. Concerns about the meaning of humanness in community arise when success comes with more acres and fewer neighbors, and efficiency becomes an all-important value.
Is it possible that heightened concern about food in this corporate-controlled, globalized economic system is a gift from God? Is it possible that concerns about food will lead to a more democratic, more participatory discussion of what kind of economy will best serve the needs of Creation and the needs of all of God's children?
As we struggle with such questions, and pray in the Lord's Prayer that God's kingdom may come on earth as in heaven, let us also work ceaselessly for the justice that leads to the promise of shalom.
Judith Bortner Heffernan is executive director of Heartland Network for Town and Rural Ministries in Columbia, Mo.