THE PEOPLE LEFT BEHIND A report by the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty

6 Reasons for Action Simple justice demands that we take action now. It is imperative that the US provide rural poor people with the same opportunities to share in the fruits of our social and economic progress that all other citizens enjoy. Today’s rural poor have been left behind in the wake of basic changes in the fabric of rural life.

We must act now because the rural poor, in their desire for the same goods and services enjoyed by most urban people, continue to pile up in the central cities of America.

We must act now because our antipoverty programs have bypassed the rural poor. Rural poverty is not as apparent as urban poverty..

We must act now because our rural communities do not share the benefits of much of our nation’s economic growth and technical change, and the conditions in these communities are destined to become much worse unless basic changes are made.

We must act because our rural communities are unable to prepare people to participate in the modern economy, and they will become increasingly less able to do so unless there are concerted and extensive changes.

We must act now because our public programs rural America are woefully out of date.

RECOMMENDATIONS

National policy to give rural residents equality of opportunity…jobs, medical care, housing, education, welfare, and all other public services National policy of full employment Re-focus public assistance programs to provide every person adequate food, clothing and shelter, medical care, and education

Overhauling the manpower policies, particularly public employment to deal with unemployment and underemployment Extensive changes in rural education from preschool to adult education Rapid expansion of rural health manpower Family planning programs

Rural housing Creation of new units of local government New means to involve poor people in planning Provide assistance to limited resource farms, small farms, and low income people living on farms Build local, state, and federal partnerships to address rural poverty

Poverty in Rural America, Janet Fichen (1981) “What all of the chronically poor nonfarm people in the rural area have in common today, then, is that their parents or grandparents made an unsatisfactory transition from agriculture or agriculturally- related occupations, in which insufficient resources, unfortunate timing, and large scale economic trends all worked against their making an advantageous adaptation to nonagricultural pursuits.” Pg 56

“The structural and output consequences of that development have been explored, but with one exception, the problem of chronic excess production capacity, the costs of society of rapid agricultural development have been ignored up to this point. Yet one important cost to society cannot and should not be overlooked; it is the state of poverty of “the people left behind” by the process of agricultural development.” page 148 In 1965, 14 million rural people in poverty About ¼ of these poor lived on farms and the remaining ¾ rural nonfarm poor.

Routes to poverty: Declining labor resulting from technology and capital intensification pushed many laborers, sharecroppers, and tenants off their farms and land Some farmers were ill-equipped to cope with the complexities of increased commercialization,amd advancing technologies and lost their farms in the competitive process Some became poor during the Depression and were unable to respond to the favorable conditions in the nonfarm sector during WWII

Characteristics of the Rural Culture of Poverty Poor, substandard housing High rates of unemployment and underemployment Higher incidence of disease and infant mortality Poorer educational opportunities Higher rates of illiteracy Higher rates of fatalism and pessimism Little sense of deferred gratification Lack organization and spokespersons Suspiciousness Distrust of government agencies

Washington (the federal government) also contributed to the transformation of agriculture and rural life in negative ways. After the war, it dropped New Deal programs on behalf of the rural poor and never re-established them. There were no programs that might have encouraged and helped sharecroppers, farm laborers, and small farmers remain on the land……

Some people suggested that programs be developed to help the rural poor make the transition to urban life, but here the agrarian tradition got in the way. Americans seemingly could not allow themselves to plan migration out of farming. So the rural exodus took on massive proportions soon after WWII began and moved forward without guidance. Had human planning been employed, the nation might have avoided the burning of the cities in the 1960s.