In the last few weeks, many "experts" have been revealed within the topic of new requirements for New Zealand farms, which will inevitably devastate and diminish rural communities.
New taxes and stock reductions will ensure that around 20% of sheep and beef farms will collapse, and with them, a part of their community.
I’m going to discuss this loss of community and why it matters, rather than arguing the points themselves — which also deserve to be investigated more robustly as they seem to be only telling half of the story.
Conventional societies are connected via shared beliefs, customs and standards — these shared beliefs construct high levels of conformity within a community.
Rural and urban communities often differ substantially here, but most cannot perceive what they do not see.
Rural communities exist in "Mechanical Solidarity" (see Durkheim) where people feel connected through shared employment, responsibility and community. Everybody acts as a "cog in the machine" and everybody matters.
So, a rural teacher teaches the children, her husband farms down the road, the children’s parents run the land, or run the rural supply store or contracting business. Their neighbour coaches the local rugby team, and their sister runs the local Young Farmers.
Every lost "cog" will have a consequence and that loss is felt acutely within that community with social, cultural and economic reverberations.
Urban people often operate within "Organic Solidarity". Essentially this means that everybody is potentially a free agent with more individuality, and there is more emphasis on the division of labour within urban centres, rather than being reliant on one another.
People often comment on cities and their "lack of community", and there are pertinent reasons for this: The dimensions, frantic pace, and density of many urban centres ruptures communal cohesion, and affects how individuals relate to one another. However, this also allows for more individual expression and diversity than rural areas.
There is a larger Mechanical Solidarity at work in the background, where the farmers grow food to feed the urban people who often work in the factories that produce food made from farmed products, or to sell them in supermarkets or to be prepared for export.
There are of course, many more occupations connected with farming in some way. The (substantial) taxes from export products and all of these people in the employment chain flow through the government to help keep this country running.
This concept is ultimately why it is often difficult for urbanites to understand why rural community and farming matters so much to our country.
To understand this, you will need to step back and take a holistic view.
The socio-cultural divide between rural and urban populations has been widening for a while now. Healthcare, mental health services, educational specialists and much more, have been withdrawing their services from rural areas, often being centralised in urban centres.
The uptake in pine forest plantations is a topic I have written about before — and is a substantial threat to our rural communities, our export industry, and will result in increasingly dark monocultural blots on our landscape which will be difficult to ever reverse. Lock up and leave forestry will require almost no staff.
However, it is this new threat on rural community that is as equally or more frightening. Anomic social circumstances will result in rural communities suffering from a dissolving or disappearance of norms and values that were once foundational in that community.
An anomie frequently follows when there is a dramatic change within a community that negatively affects its economic and/or political structure.
A period of anomie can be responsible for spates of suicide or poor mental health within communities — particularly rural — because the low population levels make such drastic changes more obvious.
Through this new policy, we will experience an anomic situation at full force — there is a tidal wave of poor rural mental health coming.
One way out of this devastating situation is to build strong social ties through organisations such as Young Farmers, sports clubs, Rural Women, school/community events and even getting together with neighbours.
This is what helps individuals and groups endure significant societal changes when the influences of stability and community values are rocked. With a substantial chunk of many rural communities set to sell up and leave, this is why it is going to be so devastating for our rural communities, and it will affect the entire country.
Wider social considerations must also be considered. The shut-down of rural communities could result in increased Structural Strain, whereby individuals who are unable to live their lives by their values, beliefs and living standards, turn to undesirable behaviours such as crime, to grasp on to some portion of their old life.
This could be initiated by loss of income, but it could also be a loss of common connection, or usefulness. Such a concept can be seen within the current rise of crime and theft in conjunction with the cost of living rising exponentially.
In New Zealand, we suffer from poor mental health and suicide statistics. When the lens of being rural is applied to this issue, the statistics are even worse, and not improving anytime soon.
In rural areas, there are a specific set of circumstances that attribute to this issue, including isolation, a lack of services, attitudes to help seeking, and much more. With a large drop in rural community population, they will be hit even harder, and poor mental health will skyrocket.
These factors and cross-cultural considerations must be considered carefully within the context of making decisions that will adversely affect our people, their families and their mental health.
— Kathryn Wright is a rural mental health professional and researcher. She plans to begin a doctorate in mid-2023 on rural community connection.
