The Fundamental Value of Agrarianism
Justin Dodd Mullikin
Keywords: Agrarianism, Critical development, Rwanda, COVID-19
In March of 2020 I was on my way to help facilitate a focus group discussion in southern Rwanda when a member of my research team got a call that we had to head back to Kigali. The government had just given 24 hours’ notice of a country-wide lockdown in response to growing COVID-19 cases. Rwanda’s lockdown was one of the most extensive implemented globally that year. You could only leave your house to go grocery shopping or to the hospital and travel between districts was entirely forbidden. The only broad exception to the lockdown rules was for agriculture.
We had been doing research on the effects of land use consolidation (LUC), a policy that was forcing many farmers into monocropping. In under a decade, a patchwork landscape of small, mixed-used plots had, in the most “successful” LUC areas, been transformed into homogenous stretches of maize, rice, and a handful of other market-oriented and export crops. Farmers who didn’t (or couldn’t) fall in line with this policy were often subjected to intense state coercion, forced displacement, and constant derision. Prioritizing subsistence cultivation was, according to many officials, an indication of “ignorant mindsets” that were holding the country back from realizing its development potential. These farmers were a problem.
Unable to continue our planned research, my team and I spent the next few months conducting phone interviews with the farmers who had previously participated in our focus groups. The Rwandan government, as effectively as it controlled the initial spread of COVID, struggled to feed people throughout months of lockdown. People who had been unwilling to participate in LUC, or those with too little land or resources (i.e., the “poor”), and had maintained some form of subsistence cultivation were now the people best able to take care of themselves, their neighbors and, by extension, their country. As two of them explained:
In my community the majority are farmers and have food, we contributed some food to help people living in towns. – Francois, Gatsibo District
COVID affected business men and big farmers who had to interact with many people for their businesses to run. Me, I am a small farmer relying on farm production to feed my family and the small quantity [I previously] brought to the market can be still [used] at home. – Charite, Gatsibo District.
This isn’t to say that all farmers had the same ideas about how best to support agriculturalists post-pandemic. Many did plan to raise more food crops (if allowed) in the future. Still others said they planned to raise more market crops in order to (hopefully) make and save more money against the next disaster. Some smallholders do aspire to run their farms like businesses. What they all had in common, though, was a claim to more respect.
I had just spent the previous four months hearing from government officials and local leaders about how successful Rwanda’s transition away from small-scale, subsistence farming had been. Furthermore, a common sentiment within the Ministry of Agriculture was that this transition hadn’t gone far enough. As one high-level official told me,
“I think Rwanda should be managed as one big farm... Give [smallholders] money, a pension, move [them] off the land and let business take over... [But] you cannot create landless farmers any more. You, in America, you did this and now you complain and say it can’t be done!”
This model of development - one predicated on notions like efficiencies of scale, linear growth, and urbanization per se - emerged from the Global North where it is still dominant. Still, we must do more than offer respect. We must do more, even, than equally incorporating rural perspectives into development policy and planning. If we are to ever move beyond the destructive model of development - where the rural is something to advance out of and where the end goal of all policy is, essentially, for everyone to have more money - and if we are to move beyond all the associated harmful stereotypes that these ideas of “modernity” and “progress” inherently impose on the rural (poor, undeveloped, etc.), perhaps we also have to radically change our values.
One woman, when asked if she was worried about herself and community, responded “No,” because “this COVID is for rich people who have traveled over[seas]. Me, I am a simple farmer unable to travel to anywhere.” Hearing this reminded me of an observation from Wendell Berry about the way elders in his agrarian community talked about their youth:
They were poor, as country people have often been, but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other’s comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much.
What if, instead of working to overturn rural stereotypes, we embraced them and turned them on their heads to form new values? What if we enlarged the idea of “poverty” as a worthy concept that means one has little need for money to still live a healthy, fulfilling life, and then worked toward that ideal? It wouldn’t necessarily mean emulating rurality or returning to agrarianism. It would mean elevating social cohesion as a fundamental consideration of development planning, prioritizing social reproduction as much as we do economic production, and ensuring that no matter the state of “the economy,” people still have good, meaningful work to do that sustains them as well as their communities. After all, there are no “jobs” in an agrarian community - there is simply work to be done and people willing to do it. The agrarian ideal of self-sustaining (in the broadest possible sense), mutually reproductive human-environment communities is not just a relic of the past to be saved, nor a vanishing way of life to be accorded respect; it may just be our best guide for the future of all life on earth.
— Justin Dodd Mullikin
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