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
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…
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 go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I personally prefer more rural living, even though that’s not an option for me at the moment. There’s also something to be said for localized food sources from less monoculture farms.
On the other hand, cities are extremely efficient in delivering services; in a properly designed city, personal transit isn’t really needed at all, and each service can just serve many more people.
The currently-employed “more efficient” farming methods are also only possible by continuing to centralize more and more land under single owners
This I don’t necessarily agree with, at least not in a capitalistic sense. Fewer entities , maybe, but if these are run as worker cooperatives, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.
Granted, this is a problem under the current system where fewer entities ain’t going to be cooperatives more often than not, but this is a wider problem.
heavy use of fertilizers and mono-culture
This is true, but I can’t see how we go back without a population crash. We just can’t sustain the current population without modern farming practices, I don’t think. I think birth rates are finally slowing down, and I’m actually somewhat optimistic we’re, despite some predictions, kind of reaching a natural carrying capacity; but even at our current levels, we’d need a huge shift in society that would push many, many more back to sustenance farming if we had no fertilizers or otherwise modern farming, which I’m not sure is a good thing overall from a human well-being perspective. The current situation is obviously rife with problems as well, I agree with what you’re pointing out.
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…
I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I personally prefer more rural living, even though that’s not an option for me at the moment. There’s also something to be said for localized food sources from less monoculture farms.
On the other hand, cities are extremely efficient in delivering services; in a properly designed city, personal transit isn’t really needed at all, and each service can just serve many more people.
This I don’t necessarily agree with, at least not in a capitalistic sense. Fewer entities , maybe, but if these are run as worker cooperatives, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.
Granted, this is a problem under the current system where fewer entities ain’t going to be cooperatives more often than not, but this is a wider problem.
This is true, but I can’t see how we go back without a population crash. We just can’t sustain the current population without modern farming practices, I don’t think. I think birth rates are finally slowing down, and I’m actually somewhat optimistic we’re, despite some predictions, kind of reaching a natural carrying capacity; but even at our current levels, we’d need a huge shift in society that would push many, many more back to sustenance farming if we had no fertilizers or otherwise modern farming, which I’m not sure is a good thing overall from a human well-being perspective. The current situation is obviously rife with problems as well, I agree with what you’re pointing out.
It’s certainly a tough nut to crack at any rate.