The Depopulation of Rural Areas and the Farming System

Depopulation of rural areas can entail negative externalities. This paper examines, inter alia, the influence of the farming system on depopulation processes. The population change in rural communities in Switzerland (family-based farming system) and in the German Land Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (fordistic farming system) is explained through regression analysis by the proportion of persons occupied in the three economic sectors and by other variables. In Switzerland, a high proportion of locals occupied in farming affects population dynamics positively; in MecklenburgWestern Pomerania, the situation is exactly opposite. This can serve as an argument to support small and networked farms in rural problem regions. 1. Is depopulation a problem? Since TIEBOUT (1956) has introduced a model about migration which, from today’s perspective, seems naive, the question whether migration processes cause problems has been answered to a considerable degree. Tiebout started with the young definition of public goods by Samuelson (1954). The latter had just shown that public goods like public security or clean air can only be provided by a central government. Tiebout argued, however, public goods that were local, like trailing paths or village fairs, would make a difference. For such local public goods, supply and demand (via migration to municipalities with low taxes or with a better supply of public goods) interact in a way that enables an effective competition between municipalities, creating a market for local public goods. This would, theoretically, mean that municipalities should compete against each other whilst the central government should remain passive. During the following decades, many authors (BUCHANAN und GOETZ, 1972; BOADWAY und FLATTERS, 1982; STAHL und VARAYIA, 1983; STIGLITZ, 1983) concentrated on the efficiency of interregional redistribution by a central government. The arguments in favor of transfers from rich to poor regions by a central government differed depending on model assumptions, but it became soon clear, that migration decisions from sparsely populated areas may well entail negative externalities. Schön (1997; 43) summarizes that there may be a market failure of resource allocation under spatial aspects. Hence, this rebuts Tiebout and shows that a support for communities which were not competitive in attracting inmigration may be an efficient solution. These results could be confirmed by empirical results during recent decades, when rapid depopulation of rural regions could be observed in Spain (Cena and Fernandez-Cavada, 1986) or Russia (BONDARENKO, 1999; KONTOROVICH, 2000; SAVCHENKO, 2001) and important components of the local infrastructure could not be maintained any more. As early as 1972, Buchanan and Goetz talk about an “undue concentration of persons in the large and growing conurbations“. In this paper, two Middle European Regions in which depopulation processes occur to a different degree (and presumably with different causes) are compared. Switzerland and the North-Eastern German Land of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania may have a similar size (41 000 vs. 23 000 square kilometres), but the population structure is very different, indeed. Due to the topographic heterogeneity of Switzerland, their 7.2 Mill. inhabitants are extremely unevenly distributed between the urban regions of the North and the West and the Southern mountain regions, whereas the 1.75 inhabitants of Mecklenburg Western Pomerania dwell much more uniformly on the whole region. For Switzerland as a whole, depopulation is not a problem. Not only has the country’s population risen through immigration and birth surplus during recent decades. Also municipalities with a population density below 150 p./km which may be called rural have in three quarters of cases seen a rise in population between 1990 and 2000, not a decline. In these cases, land-loss through urbanisation seems to be a greater problem than depopulation. However, on a local level there are cases where depopulation occurs and jeopardises the sustainability of villages (Rieder, 2003). For Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, depopulation is not a local problem but a general one. Since reunification in 1990, population figures have declined by 150,000, caused both by a historically low birth rate and by massive outmigration. The cities of the region, which have partly lost more than 20 per cent of their population since 1990, but also peripheral regions are particularly concerned. On the other hand, commuter belts have gained inhabitants. Hence, migration movements from the cores of cities to their fringe as well as depopulation of peripheral regions can be characterized as the most significant population developments of this Land. A soon turnaround of this development can not be expected. As our particular interest focuses on the role of agriculture in depopulation processes, their difference is described in Section 2. We find the term of an agricultural system useful for this purpose. In Section 3, a hypothesis of the role of the agricultural system in depopulation processes is developed. In order to test this hypothesis, an empirical study is carried out. The methodology is described in Section 4, results in Section 5. Implications for the significance of agricultural structures are outlined in Section 6. 2. Agricultural systems in Switzerland and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania It is not only the structure of demographic problems which distinguishes the two regions. The agricultural structure of both regions is also fundamentally different, which can be made clear with help of a few figures. The average farm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has a size of 269 hectares (Land Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2003), the average Swiss farm of 16 hectares (Schweizerischer Bauernverband, 2003). More than the half of Swiss pig holdings still keeps below 50 animals, whereas farms with 10 000 pigs are no exception in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania; the largest pig holding has even 40 000 animals. More than half of the farmland of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania today is used by legal persons, while the family farm is almost the only existent legal form for Swiss farms. The different structures are certainly partly due to different topographic conditions. But the main cause is a historical one. Since many centuries, the agricultural structure of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is dominated by large manors. From a cultural point of view, this simplified the process of industrialisation of agriculture which was propagated and realised in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). A new production model arose that was characterised by a large-scale production of standardised goods on the one hand, by new social duties of the farm cooperatives like providing housing or childcare on the other. This “unity of economic and social policy”, a core policy element of the late GDR, vanished with reunification. After almost all social activities were abandoned, and after labour on the farm was substituted on a large scale by capital, we now find a production system in East German agriculture that has been labelled “fordism” around 100 years ago (Gramsci, 1971): A fully rationalised system, which has maximum efficiency from a farm management point of view (Land, 2000; Land and Willisch, 2002). Agriculture in Switzerland is not only, since many centuries, characterised by farm families. Agriculture is also the social foundation for Switzerland as a state: It were farmers who founded the state by their common oath on the Rütli mountain. The experience of the isolated position during the world wars of the 20 century increased the consciousness of how important domestic farm production was. Hence, Switzerland’s agriculture shows one of the highest PSE’s worldwide since decades. This, again, has led to a relatively low pressure on farms and, as a result, to the described small-scale structure. This is an explanation why we find in Switzerland an extreme example for the dominant Western European agricultural system that is defined by the unity of family, household and farm (Schmitt, 1999, Rossier, 2001). The term ‘agricultural system’ is most often used for agricultural production in developing countries (Collinson, 2000). But the described differences show that the distinction is a systematic, not a gradual one, extending from economic to social dimensions. Therefore the term ‘system’ seems to be adequate for our comparison. 3. A hypothesis about the role of the agricultural system in depopulation processes While depopulation processes have been explained by social (Kiang, 1975) and demographic (Heleniak, 1999) factors, by low household incomes (Beale, 1977; Domazlicky, 2002), changing patterns of demand (Whelan, 1999) or an over-specialization of regions (Simard, 1998), this paper focuses on the different role of economic sectors in rural areas. The following hypothesis is to be tested with respect to the different agricultural systems: Agriculture in systems based on farming families can, relative to their economic strength, contribute above average to prevent or slow down depopulation processes. Farms in fordistic production systems, however, are not able to contribute positively to population development. This hypothesis is explained by the following observations: • Households of farming families are usually organised in a rather traditional way (Rossier, 2001), including a higher number of children (Harsche, 1999). For Switzerland, a recent survey among farm households revealed an average of 2.7 children per woman, while the Swiss total average is just 1.4 children per woman. In fordistic systems where there are no farming families in the traditional sense but rather employers and employees in large agricultural firms, these peculiarities will vanish. • Local interdependencies with other economic actors in the region may be another important factor. A farm generates addition added value for the region if it buys feed and seeds as ell as goods for the farm household in the community. Table 1 cites a study based on Social Accountancy matrices which shows the value generation of one monetary unit put into any local sector of a Swiss mountain valley. Agriculture has, behind tourism, the highest local multiplicator. A similar analysis for an agricultural enterprise in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania could not be published because none of such interdependencies could be discovered: All production factors were purchased outside the community and even the labourers employed came from other regions. Tab.1: Demand multipliers in Val Bregaglia (BUSER et al., 2002)