Farm production policy versus rural life policy

Five questions are posed as a structure for this paper. The questions provide a structure for thinking about why we have farm policy but not rural policy: 1) How do we explain the persistence of farmers' power? 2) Does the persistence of farmers' political power explain the lack of power of other rural interests? That is, is there a crowding-out phenomenon? 3) Is the power of the farm lobby less a reflection of a coherent political base than an accident of history that is unlikely to reoccur, making it improbable that rural residents in Canada and the US will ever exert political influence proportionate to their numbers? 4) Is there a sufficient coherent core of interests among the nonfarm rural population that could constitute a base for a coalition that could lead to a rural life policy? 5) Why has the agricultural economics profession played such a minimalrole in addressing the development issues of rural nonfarm people? Answering these questions requires examining a diverse set of relationships that include economic, political, and sociocultural phenomena. An explanation for the ongoing power of the farm lobby in Canada and the US reflects changes in the structure of agriculture both internally and in terms of its relationship with agribusiness, changes in the distribution of political power in the governments, and an ongoing ability of farm groups to maintain cultural myths such as the Jeffersonian view of agriculture as the ideal basis for democracy. Conversely, there is little evidence of internal cohesion among nonfarm rural residents, nor do they and the farm groups share a common philosophy or vision of development. Where broader rural coalitions form, they tend to be at the local level and relate to a specific issue. Once the issue is resolved, the coalition collapses. As long as rural policy required a national impetus, these local groups were too small to gain attention. In addition, the changing structure of the rural economy and of broader society in North America now makes it difficult for nonfarm rural groups to gain entry into the policy process even as agriculture's influence declines to the point that a potentially opening occurs.