Exacerbated Industrial Growth - Step 4

The Basic Issue

The flood of migrants from the rural to urban areas over the past 150 years, has had two indirect effects on the rural areas:

1. It has shifted the political locus from the rural area to the urban. Now most people live in the urban areas and increasingly have always lived there. This means that the urban cultural values tend to inform the:
   • legislation which is produced at provincial and federal levels, often in ignorance of rural needs, dynamics, and contexts.

   • news, media, and entertainment productions which fill the air waves, magazine stands, and bookshelves,

   • educational curricula and productions which are used in the school system.

2. It has enabled the industrial sector to expand, or from another perspective, it has exacerbated industrial production, which in turn:
   • increased the production of new tools for agriculture which has fueled the dynamics in the rural areas.

   • increased the pollution directly and indirectly with the products it has created, releasing toxic substances into the biosphere often without full awareness of their individual or combined effects.

   • Developed labor saving devices which have resulted in far fewer hours being required for tasks in most areas of life from home to workplace to avocations, creating a further social change in most sectors of modern life.

   • added many years on to the average span of life through advances in healthcare and nutrition, as well as giving easy control of population growth rates to those who wish to use them.

   • expanded the transportation and communication systems facilitating the flow of people, goods, services and ideas throughout the country.

The main cumulative effect of the expanded industrialization on rural life is that it has speeded up the dynamics which are already occurring, and made it harder for the remnant rural population to be heard in meaningful dialogue.

Industry now far outstrips the agricultural sector in its percentage of contribution to GNP but it is still the provision of that initial food and fiber into the industrial system which enables the whole economic system to work at all. One of the problems in the shift to "purchased inputs " by farmers is that these inputs are now produced in the cities by industry. This means that with the drop in ratio of purchased inputs to land an labor inputs, most of the "work" in food production is now being done in the cities. It is felt by some people that farmers now add very little percent-wise to the agricultural product chain, therefore, their low returns should reflect that new reality. In other words, the commonly heard saying that "one farmer now produces far more product per person than was the case before simply is not true. What is really happening is that the division of labor has spread the work over laborers in the urban areas now, and hi is but one bit-player (albeit an important one) in the product chain. The product chain no longer starts with the farmer and his land, it starts long before that in an urban chemical-fertilizer plant and seed genetic-modification lab.

Exacerbated industrialization was the fourth domino to fall, the fourth step on the road to our present situation. The next domino or step in the process is one which arises because of the cumulative effects of the first four. The process is not starting to "snowball" on itself, and the cumulative effects resulted in the quest for global markets.

Rural Development Institute Research Studies

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