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Chapter 1 Introduction Jane Adams At the beginning of the twentieth century, North American agriculture prospered. A century ago, one could imagine that agriculture and industry were, or could be, balanced and complementary. The countryside was densely populated with agriculture, timbering, and mining supporting dynamic small towns. Farmers produced both for their own needs and for the needs of the larger society, creating complex and regionally specific circuits of commercial and customary exchange. Often riven with class, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divisions and conflicts, rural communities provided the hearth for much of the U.S. and Canada's political, intellectual, and cultural life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a revolution in production has been virtually completed. The countryside is depopulated. Agricultural labor has been almost completely replaced with mechanical , chemical, biological, and information technologies. The few commercial farmers left provide few of their daily household or enterprise needs from their own production. Firms offering specialized supplies and services sell the resources that were once part of a farmer's necessary stock of knowledge and skill. North American farms have always been part of the larger national and world economies, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their role as primary producers has been vastly overshadowed by other elements in the agriculture-food system (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000). In the process, small towns that once served as seats of government, market centers, and manufactories for their rural hinterlands have lost their reason for existence. Those in the orbits of urban regions have become bedroom communities. Those that do not lie within easy reach of cities are withering and dying, populated largely by retirees and the people who care for them.l 2 Jane Adams This transformation flags a sharp shift in the issues facing rural America. While farmers continue to face volatile and unpredictable weather, marketing, and labor conditions, the attention of the nation, and of some farmers, has shifted to the environment and to community quality oflife. The environmental movement ofthe mid-twentieth century signaled this shift. It framed apocalyptic visions of a future laid waste by overpopulation and pollution. It has been the leading foe ofthe application ofgenetic engineering to agriculture, and among the strongest critics of the green revolution and its biotechnologies. At its more radical edges, but with broad sympathy from large portions of the population, it began creating visions of human-nature interrelations far different from scientific and technical models of knowledge and control. As many of the articles in this volume document, "green" politics have become an increasingly important aspect of debates regarding farming and farm policy. The Politics of Agriculture Throughout most of the twentieth century, agricultural and rural policy debates have been framed in technical and economic terms. Only rarely have social relationships been highlighted. And, aside from an enduring concern with conservation, the destructive consequences of radically simplifying the ecology were unforeseen. As Ferguson (1990) observed, mid-twentieth century theories of development assumed that all social problems would yield to expert-driven technical solutions.2 For much of the century, most rural people seemed to agree that expert advice not only promised but provided unprecedented prosperity and comfort, and they accepted the downsides of declining populations and emigrating children as a necessary consequence . Governmental policies and private initiatives created enormous material abundance, signaled by the year-round availability of inexpensive fresh and processed foods in every North American supermarket. Except for a few dissenting voices, the direction of the postwar food system received virtually unquestioned support. That is no longer the case. At the end of the century, as several of the essays in this book demonstrate, those policy decisions have led to the threat of both ecological and social death. They have eliminated most farmers, emptied out the countryside, and created production systems predicated on chemicals that contaminate surface waters, drain ancient aquifers, and often poison the farmers themselves. My own work has traced this transformation (Adams 1994b). Nostalgia and regret are not attitudes becoming of a scholar, but one cannot look at the current conditions Introduction 3 of rural America without feeling that, as Kathryn Dudley says in this volume, "something has gone terribly wrong." And, as immigrants from Mexico, other Latin American countries, and other regions of the Third World pour into the United States and other industrial nations , it is obvious that the current wave of capitalist development, termed globalization, is restructuring the peasant agricultures that have remained in the rest...

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