December 9, 1999 - Rural Development Forum
MPBN Radio Report by Naomi Schalit
A mix of farmers, policy makers, economic development specialists and
academics attended a forum on rural development at the University
of Maine today. As Naomi Schalit reports, the subject was making
agriculture the focus of rural development efforts in the state:
Naomi Schalit: "There is no culture without agriculture," says the writer Wendell Berry, who was quoted this morning by Maine Agriculture Commissioner
Bob Spear. And if there was one message at today's conference,
it was that Maine's rural communities need farms to remain vital.
But speaker after speaker went through the litany of challenges
facing any attempt to keep Maine's farming sector and it's rural
areas alive. The average age of the state's farmers is in the
mid-fifties. Land is expensive, and selling out to development
is often the retirement dream of a farmer. Fluctuating commodity
prices can ruin a million-dollar operation in one bad year. But
Governor Angus King, who addressed the crowd at lunchtime, was
resolutely upbeat:
Governor King: I think agriculture has a bigger part
to play in the future of Maine than it has in the recent past.
Naomi Schalit: Agriculture is the thread that binds the
fabric of Maine together, said King. He outlined a series of goals
that he'd like to see reached by 2010 -- such as a 30% increase
in the amount of Aroostook county potato acreage, an irrigation
system that meets the need for consistent water delivery, Maine
organic grains being sold all over the country, and a farmer's
market in every community...and in cyberspace. And besides the
lofty goals, the Governor outlined some concrete proposals: to
overhaul the farm and open space law, to increase the state's
marketing assistance to farmers, and to give tax breaks to farmers
who protect habitat. Those kinds of things will have to be done
soon, said King:
Governor King: My greatest fear is that the loss of agriculture
will happen in small increments and we won't be aware of it.
Mark Lapping, former provost at the University of Southern Maine
and a farm policy expert, said the state needs to make a commitment
to revitalizing agriculture in Maine... the kind of commitment
Maine has shown already to other businesses and to industrial
development:
Mark Lapping: Much of economic development policy has
been an attraction policy; let's move a firm from out of state
into state and we really try to seduce businesses from one jurisdiction
to another, and it's not really about the creation of wealth it's
more about the movement of wealth from one place to another place;
we'll do this with locational incentives, we'll do worker training
so forth and so on to bring a new factory into town; but here
we have farms that are already there, the bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush, and we don't go far enough in extending
the kinds of supports that we would to a chino pants factory if
it came in as we would to five or six farms.
Naomi Schalit: Any business that can be lured here, said
Lapping, can also be lured away from here. Not so with farms,
he said -- it's really hard to buy out a farm in Maine and move
it to Indiana. A farm represents wealth that's sunk in the land.
And Bob Ho, director of the Maine Rural Development Council, acknowledged
that after decades of agricultural decline across the country,
promoting farms as a viable form of rural economic development
sounded strange. But it was possible, he said, and policymakers
who ignore the economic potential of farms do so at the entire
state's peril.
Bob Ho: It has to be viable, because our survival is at
stake. The future of our community is at stake. The future of
our downtown is at stake, the future of our downtown, our town
centers is at stake -- so it has to be.
