This week I have discussed, in my MSc course Understanding Rural Development, the modernization of Europe’s agriculture and rural areas in the post World War II era. By showing pictures, tables and figures I have tried to demonstrate how drastically the rural landscape, the agrarian structure and the food supply chain have changed in a period of several decades. Multifunctional countrysides were transformed into places for specialized and high-tech forms of food and fibre production, the number of farms decreased by some 80% in 50 years time, the average farm size increased enormously, agricultural employment decreased drastically, an ever increasing part of the agricultural products are processed by the food processing industry and the supermarket has become the dominant outlet for most food products. There are, of course, differences between regions and countries, but this is the prevailing development trend in EU member states that have been subject to the EU’s original Common Agricultural Policy. The agricultural modernization project has been very successful in terms of creating food self sufficiency in Europe at low prices for consumers, but this has also come at a cost. By the 1990s the negative side-effects of modernization became widely acknowledged. When talking about negative side-effects topics as environmental pollution, degradation of biodiversity, declining farmers’ incomes, animal welfare concerns and consumers’ distrust in the modern food system are usually brought to the fore.

Inspired by a humorous and thought-proviking presentation of James Howard Kunstler at the TED 2004 conference (“The tragedy of suburbia” ) as the analogy between suburbian development and agricultural modernization is astonishing, another side-effect came to mind: the loss of a sense of place and a sense of belonging due to the (feeling of) expropriation of local self control (e.g. due to centralized spatial planning) and due to the eradication of many specific and distinctive regional assets (cultural history, landscape, traditional products and processing techniques, etc…). Rural regions that were subject to the agricultural modernization project have de facto become non-places and are thus easily interchangeable. And as a result many rural regions have become, quoting Kunstler, places not worth caring about … and places not worth caring about are places not worth protecting or defending.

Looking at rural development from this point of view sheds an interesting light on its dynamics. Continue reading →