Dealing with Ambiguity: On the Interdependence of Change in Agriculture and Rural Communities

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dealing with Ambiguity: On the Interdependence of Change in Agriculture and Rural Communities ALUN E. JOSEPH, JACQUELINE M. LIDGARD AND RICHARD BEDFORD In November, 1999 the New Zealand Labour Party, the party that had initiated the massive wave of state-led restructuring which swept over the country in the years following 1984, won the national elections. They pledged to ‘close the gaps’ gaps that had become evident in an increasingly polarised society (Kelsey, 1997). The most visible and best documented of these gaps was between Maori and non-M-aori (Te Puni Kokori, 1998). But there were others, including some long-standing disparities based upon geography. Frequently cited were disparities amongst regions and between rural and urban areas (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). Evidence of concern about the latter was a decision by the new government to reinstate a Ministry of Economic Development and to initiate a programme of state-provided regional development assistance. Competition for such assistance has become very keen at local authority and community levels, but in the rural sphere it has occurred against the backdrop of considerable ambiguity and uncertainty with respect to the economic and social dynamics of small country towns and rural communities. The well-established linkages between the fortunes of agriculture and rural communities that have characterised the histories of rural areas throughout the world (Smithers and Joseph, 1999), and in New Zealand (Pomeroy, 1995), have been severely challenged over the last two decades. The tangible sense of interdependency and mutually supportive interactions between farming and local communities can no longer be asserted with confidence. Locally this can be attributed to the fact that rural New Zealand has been evolving rapidly in response to both short-term cycles of change associated with economic and institutional restructuring and longer term cycles of change involving broad shifts in technology, demographic patterns and lifestyle (Joseph, 1999). As a cumulative consequence of these ‘layers’ of change, both agriculture and rural communities now seem more economically and socially differentiated than ever before, and at times the linkages between the two sectors have become obscured or even lost. There is a growing belief in some quarters that agriculture and rural communities in developed economies are set The well-established linkages between the fortunes of agriculture and rural communities that have characterised the histories of rural areas in New Zealand and elsewhere have been severely challenged over the past two decades. Some commentators have posited a de-coupling of the two sectors. This paper explores evolving farm and rural community interactions in New Zealand, first with reference to a descriptive model and second with reference to the lived experiences of rural residents in two Central North Island communities, Taumarunui and Tirau. The key finding from the research is that the distinction between de-coupling and re-linking while conceptually appealing is empirically problematic as observed trends suggest a complex and ambiguous mixture of both. Alun Joseph is Professor of Geography and Dean of the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Jacqueline Lidgard is a Research Fellow in the Migration Research Group at the University of Waikato, Hamilton. Richard Bedford is Professor of Geography and Convenor of the Migration Research Group at the University of Waikato. RESEARCH 57 (1) 2001: 17 Geographer NEW ZEALAND The primary distinction among forces of change is between economic and social restructuring, which is viewed as a deliberate political project (Kelsey, 1997; Moran, 1999), and the longer term effect of a complex and diffuse set of changes captured, albeit imperfectly, under the banner of technology, demography and lifestyle. This distinction is somewhat artificial, in that restructuring has involved change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviour (important components of ‘lifestyle’) and the application of new ways of doing things (an important component of ‘technology’). Conflation also flows from the fact that power relations, tied as they are to control over discourse (Shucksmith, 1994), can change as a function of both short-term structural adjustment and longer term cycles of (dis)investment in the social and economic capital of rural areas. Restructuring is a widely used term. Here it is taken to denote significant structural adjustment across a number of sectors, through which the ‘rules’ under which people experience society are changed and new ‘referees’ empowered (Joseph and Knight, 1999). In New Zealand, the most dramatic manifestation of this structural adjustment process began only in 1984, so it constitutes a short cycle of change. It is the speed as well as the comprehensiveness of restructuring in New Zealand that has brought into focus a series of questions about the sustainability of established regimes of agricultural production and the ability of rural communities to reproduce themselves socially and economically (Pomeroy, 1995; 1997). This issue of sustainability will be revisited later in the discussion, with the intent of moderating the tendency to ‘blame restructuring’ by drawing attention to the cumulative impact of long cycles of change and their reflection in challenges to sustainable communities. Discourse, or the ‘power of words’ (Joseph and Knight, 1999), lies at the core of economic and social restructuring as a social process. Consistent with neo-liberal ideology, proponents of restructuring speak almost exclusively about deregulation, but it has become increasingly evident that structural adjustment has also involved a considerable degree of re-regulation (Moran, 1999). In Figure 1, the relationship between policy and agriculture/rural communities is shown. Deregulation is characteristic of changes in agriculture while re-regulation is more characteristic of changes in rural communities. In the following discussion, we progressively shift our attention away from the general forces and mechanisms of change to consider specific and measurable change in the economic and social activities that lie at the heart of rural life. These activities are represented on the horizontal axis of the model (Figure 1) and constitute a primary focus in the case study. Restructuring and the rural sector Agriculture received immediate and considerable attention in the structural adjustment process initiated by a reform-minded Labour government in 1984. The removal of minimum price guarantees set in motion a series of upon separate trajectories, and that this is contributing to their progressive de-coupling (Smithers and Joseph, 1999). Yet, on one issue at least, there remains a shared interest. In both the agriculture and rural sectors, there are interrelated concerns about capacity to manage change and the ability to survive in the long term (Pomeroy, 1997). In this sense there is a shared interest in sustainable development which, inevitably, will continue to mean some interdependence of change in the two sectors. In this paper we report on research dealing with evolving farm and rural community interactions in New Zealand (see Bedford et al., 1999; Bedford and Lidgard, 2001; Lidgard et al., 2000). We do so with an eye to integration, which is pursued in three ways. First, our study is set within a descriptive model of agricultural and rural community change, thereby integrating the analysis into a discourse about theorisation of rural change. Second, we consider equally change in both sectors, thus avoiding the trap of simplifying or holding constant one side of the change equation. Third, we ground our description and interpretation of rural change in the lived experience of residents of two places. Specifically, we look to key informants in the rural communities of Taumarunui and Tirau to provide their (integrative) interpretation, as ‘insiders’, of how change has been inscribed on their lives and communities. In doing so, we advocate the valorisation of local beliefs about interdependencies over the ‘ideology’ of policy or the ‘certainty’ of objective analysis. The substantive argument and discussion is organised in five sections. The first presents the descriptive model that provides a framework for our integrative analysis of change in the rural sector. It also introduces our approach to the case study. The second and third sections deal independently with selected characteristics of change in the agricultural and rural community sectors, as ‘read’ by our key informants. We then focus on the emerging interdependencies of change, and note the emergence of discrete ‘communities of interest’ as an important source of ambiguity in the interpretation of sector-specific development trends and emergent interdependencies (Kearns and Joseph, 1997). In the final section, we consider whether our results point clearly to either a de-coupling or a re-linking of the agricultural and community spheres of rural life. A descriptive model of agricultural and rural community change The descriptive model (Figure 1) draws upon a diverse body of theoretical and empirical literature on rural change, and it serves here both as a conceptual framework within which to situate the case study and as an interpretive framework for its results (Joseph, 1999). The peripheral components of the model characterise the forces and mechanisms of change that have swept over the rural sector. Key components of the model are emphasised in italics in the following discussion. More detailed treatments can be found in Joseph (1999), Bedford et al. (1999), and Lidgard et al. (2000). RESEARCH Geographer 57 (1) 2001: 18 NEW ZEALAND structural changes in agriculture as New Zealand farmers were exposed abruptly to the effects of globalisation. Industrialisation and the rise of large-scale corporate agriculture were notable aggregate outcomes of the structural adjustment process (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). At the same time, a number of coping strategies were adopted by farmers in the face of unfavourable ‘terms of trade’ at the farm gate. These included doing nothing at one extreme and leaving farming at the other (Cloke, 1989). The variety and complexity of coping strategies adopted on the family farm reflect its dual nature as a business and household unit (Moran, et al., 1993). Strategies being deployed include intensification or ‘going organic’ on the business side and off-farm work on the family side. Overall, the structural adjustment process resulted in fewer people working the land, often with fewer inputs, with clear implications for rural communities that had previously supplied labour and services to farms (Wilson, 1994; 1995). In rural communities, the flow-on effects from the downturn in farming were exacerbated by downward pressure on employment levels in the food processing industry (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996) and by the general withdrawal of the state from the everyday lives of New Zealanders (Kelsey, 1997). The ‘privatisation of the welfare state’ had particular implications for rural communities, where efficiencies in service provision had always been elusive. Across the board, rural communities experienced the contraction of the public sector but not the corresponding expansion of private and voluntary provision, with obvious implications for service availability (Joseph and Chalmers, 1998). Dis-investment in public provisioning also had implications for employment, especially of professionals and more broadly for the ‘identity’ of communities (Kearns and Joseph, 1997). It left schools as the last bastion of public investment in many rural communities, and thereby endowed them with considerable significance as a tangible focus of community life (Scott, et al., 1997).