Once central to rural life, cafe-bistros are closing in the face of depopulation and falling alcohol consumption, but campaigners are seeking new ways forward
Please tell us more about US and Trump-era politics, I’m sure the subscribers to /c/europe can’t wait to hear more about your country.
He’s drawing a comparison because disaffected rural voters being a major source of the right wing populist shift we’ve seen in Europe as well is a pretty international problem. We’d be stupid not to look at what’s happening in the US and learn some lessons before it’s too late.
Pretty much the exact same story played out here in Hungary; declining rural voters experiencing draining coffers and access to services, no political will to do anything about it, and promises to fix it were a big part of what kept Orbán in power so long. And he was a huge thorn in the side of the EU for years.
We can close our ears and pretend we’re above these things driving politics in the US if we want… meanwhile AfD has had a historic win. I’d say it’s probably in our interest to see how Trump politics took over America to avoid the same fate in Europe considering there are an awful lot of similarities to the conditions that birthed it in an awful lot of European countries.
are you trolling or do you really think that forced relocation of people from rural areas to cities is a serious solution to suggest?
So what’s your solution? Many European countries have tried very generous incentives to pull people back to the declining villages, Hungary would give huge loans at zero interest that could be discharged entirely, Italy has tried their own incentive programs, nothing is working. If the solution were simple we’d have done it already.
I don’t think forcibly moving people is right, obviously, but trying to reverse the incentives to get people out of villages where it’s impossible to practically provide services rather than continue the failed attempt to repopulate them doesn’t seem crazy to me.
The underlying issue with rural communities is they are being hit harder by poorly regulated trade and cheap long distance transportation. This combined with more than a century of under-investment in the infrastructure has led to a steady decline in the economies of rural regions.
The extreme wealth of the industrialized nations has been built up by taking advantage lower value of human life and labor in other regions.
For example French farm laborers are treated more like human beings with the right to live. They have reasonable pay and working hours. French farms are directly competing with farms in Africa and South America. These areas tend to treat farm laborers more like serfs. They pay very little and are treated as easily replaceable. So French farmers profits have fallen steadily over the decades. This removes money from rural communities and the community declines as well.
Politically the largest issue is that the money is leaving much faster than the people. So people sink into poverty over time but remain where they are. These people are under-educated, isolated, and suffering = fertile ground for bad actors to exploit.
The solution is too painful for the industrialized nations to even consider. It would disrupt over a century of profits and crash the global economy. Import requirements: require that the labor in the production country be treated as actual human beings like in the industrial nation.
That’s definitely a part of it. When everyone was crapping all over tariffs in general after the Trump tariff debacle, I was arguing from the left that while Trump’s trade war tariffs obviously sucked, the idea of tariffs on countries with lower labor conditions in order to make domestic workers with better pay and labor protections competitive is actually sound. If you don’t provide any penalty for undercutting labor rights and practices you’ll just get outcompeted in a market economy. And it also disincentivizes export countries from undercutting their labor, hopefully improving labor rights there.
Not only do we have undercutting of labor, but there’s also the exporting of industries with lots of negative externalities; we crow about reducing mining, or drilling, or lumber production, but we just buy those things from other countries anyway. A lot of those industries tend to be rural by nature as well.
That said, that kind of “race to the bottom” with labor conditions has hit urbanites pretty hard, too; lots of cities that were founded on heavy industry like car or steel production, manufacturing in general… unfettered globalization has hit all lower and middle classes hard.
I think though with rural communities, a big part of it is we’ve just become so efficient and reduced labor needs so much, especially in industries like farming, that small communities which are much more vulnerable to big population shifts in the first place, just die out. When you go from needing dozens of farmhands per farm, more during harvest, to only a few and a combine… small communities just can’t absorb that kind of population shift the way a city that’s more diversified can.
So for some of these villages, I just don’t think there’s any coming back even if we did have strong labor laws and some protectionism for that domestic labor (which we absolutely should). You’d have to purposefully go back to less efficient farming methods, which has some pretty big implications for a population size that’s since far outgrown that kind of output. Those villages just aren’t coming back in nearly any conceivable circumstance, I think, and there should probably be incentives to move people out of them and let them die out.
Frankly, for those small communities that don’t have any prospects for growth, I think some thought should be put into actually helping them along in closing down, moving residents out to more living communities, and rewilding the land they once sat on.
After the country-wide quarantine was lifted here in France, I hoped for a moment that we would capitalize on the remote-work experience to push as much employment as possible out of the cities and suburbs and into rural communities, but that never materialized.
I don’t think it’s necessary to empty rural villages, but there definitely needs to be a concerted effort to revitalize these parts instead of letting what amount to market forces drain them of their capacity to sustain life and communities.
The currently-employed “more efficient” farming methods are also only possible by continuing to centralize more and more land under single owners and by heavy use of fertilizers and mono-culture; there’s no telling how long they will remain effective and in the meanwhile we’re starting to recreate the landed gentry/ serfs class divide…
Please tell us more about US and Trump-era politics, I’m sure the subscribers to /c/europe can’t wait to hear more about your country.
Also,
are you trolling or do you really think that forced relocation of people from rural areas to cities is a serious solution to suggest?
He’s drawing a comparison because disaffected rural voters being a major source of the right wing populist shift we’ve seen in Europe as well is a pretty international problem. We’d be stupid not to look at what’s happening in the US and learn some lessons before it’s too late.
Pretty much the exact same story played out here in Hungary; declining rural voters experiencing draining coffers and access to services, no political will to do anything about it, and promises to fix it were a big part of what kept Orbán in power so long. And he was a huge thorn in the side of the EU for years.
We can close our ears and pretend we’re above these things driving politics in the US if we want… meanwhile AfD has had a historic win. I’d say it’s probably in our interest to see how Trump politics took over America to avoid the same fate in Europe considering there are an awful lot of similarities to the conditions that birthed it in an awful lot of European countries.
So what’s your solution? Many European countries have tried very generous incentives to pull people back to the declining villages, Hungary would give huge loans at zero interest that could be discharged entirely, Italy has tried their own incentive programs, nothing is working. If the solution were simple we’d have done it already.
I don’t think forcibly moving people is right, obviously, but trying to reverse the incentives to get people out of villages where it’s impossible to practically provide services rather than continue the failed attempt to repopulate them doesn’t seem crazy to me.
The underlying issue with rural communities is they are being hit harder by poorly regulated trade and cheap long distance transportation. This combined with more than a century of under-investment in the infrastructure has led to a steady decline in the economies of rural regions.
The extreme wealth of the industrialized nations has been built up by taking advantage lower value of human life and labor in other regions.
For example French farm laborers are treated more like human beings with the right to live. They have reasonable pay and working hours. French farms are directly competing with farms in Africa and South America. These areas tend to treat farm laborers more like serfs. They pay very little and are treated as easily replaceable. So French farmers profits have fallen steadily over the decades. This removes money from rural communities and the community declines as well.
Politically the largest issue is that the money is leaving much faster than the people. So people sink into poverty over time but remain where they are. These people are under-educated, isolated, and suffering = fertile ground for bad actors to exploit.
The solution is too painful for the industrialized nations to even consider. It would disrupt over a century of profits and crash the global economy. Import requirements: require that the labor in the production country be treated as actual human beings like in the industrial nation.
That’s definitely a part of it. When everyone was crapping all over tariffs in general after the Trump tariff debacle, I was arguing from the left that while Trump’s trade war tariffs obviously sucked, the idea of tariffs on countries with lower labor conditions in order to make domestic workers with better pay and labor protections competitive is actually sound. If you don’t provide any penalty for undercutting labor rights and practices you’ll just get outcompeted in a market economy. And it also disincentivizes export countries from undercutting their labor, hopefully improving labor rights there.
Not only do we have undercutting of labor, but there’s also the exporting of industries with lots of negative externalities; we crow about reducing mining, or drilling, or lumber production, but we just buy those things from other countries anyway. A lot of those industries tend to be rural by nature as well.
That said, that kind of “race to the bottom” with labor conditions has hit urbanites pretty hard, too; lots of cities that were founded on heavy industry like car or steel production, manufacturing in general… unfettered globalization has hit all lower and middle classes hard.
I think though with rural communities, a big part of it is we’ve just become so efficient and reduced labor needs so much, especially in industries like farming, that small communities which are much more vulnerable to big population shifts in the first place, just die out. When you go from needing dozens of farmhands per farm, more during harvest, to only a few and a combine… small communities just can’t absorb that kind of population shift the way a city that’s more diversified can.
So for some of these villages, I just don’t think there’s any coming back even if we did have strong labor laws and some protectionism for that domestic labor (which we absolutely should). You’d have to purposefully go back to less efficient farming methods, which has some pretty big implications for a population size that’s since far outgrown that kind of output. Those villages just aren’t coming back in nearly any conceivable circumstance, I think, and there should probably be incentives to move people out of them and let them die out.
Frankly, for those small communities that don’t have any prospects for growth, I think some thought should be put into actually helping them along in closing down, moving residents out to more living communities, and rewilding the land they once sat on.
After the country-wide quarantine was lifted here in France, I hoped for a moment that we would capitalize on the remote-work experience to push as much employment as possible out of the cities and suburbs and into rural communities, but that never materialized.
I don’t think it’s necessary to empty rural villages, but there definitely needs to be a concerted effort to revitalize these parts instead of letting what amount to market forces drain them of their capacity to sustain life and communities.
The currently-employed “more efficient” farming methods are also only possible by continuing to centralize more and more land under single owners and by heavy use of fertilizers and mono-culture; there’s no telling how long they will remain effective and in the meanwhile we’re starting to recreate the landed gentry/ serfs class divide…