8 Agriculture and the Environment
joint-, decentralized-, and co-management. They have been effective in several sec-
tors, including watershed, forest, irrigation, pest, wildlife, fishery, farmers’ research,
and micro-finance management. Since the early 1990s, some 400,000–500,000
new local groups were established in varying environmental and social contexts,
mostly evolving to be of similar small size, typically with 20–30 active members,
putting total involvement at some 8–15 million households. The majority show
the inclusive characteristics identified as vital for improving community well-be-
ing, and evaluations have confirmed that there are positive ecological and eco-
nomic outcomes, including for watersheds, forests and pest management.
A classic study conducted in 1946 by Walter Goldschmidt showed what hap-
pens when the social structure in the countryside changes during modernization. He
studied the two rural Californian communities of Arvin and Dinuba in the San
Joaquin Valley. These were matched for climate, value of agricultural sales, enter-
prises, reliance on irrigation, and distance from urban areas. The differences were in
farm scale: Dinuba was characterized by small family farms and Arvin by large,
commercialized farms. There were striking differences between the two communi-
ties. In Dinuba, there was a better quality of life, superior public services and facili-
ties, more parks, more shops and retail trade, more diverse businesses, twice the
number of organizations for civic improvement and social recreation, and better
participation by the public. A study of the same communities in the late 1970s reaf-
firmed these findings. Recent years have brought severe financial crises for family
farmers, as they were squeezed by debt and low prices. Many thousands lost their
businesses. Others, though, did not see this as a problem, but as desirable, as small
farmers were widely taken to be economically inefficient. But their loss has been a
severe loss to rural society. Linda Lobao’s paper shows the importance of the local-
ity that Goldschmidt illustrated. The changing structure of farming has brought
about a decline in rural population, increased poverty and income inequality, lower
numbers of community services, less democratic participation, decreased retail
trade, environmental pollution and greater unemployment. The decline of family
farming does not just harm farmers. It hurts the quality of life in the whole of
society. Corporate farms are good for productivity, but not much else: ‘this type of
farming is very limited in what it can do for a community ... we need farms that
will be viable in the future, correspond to local needs and remain wedded to the
community’.
The final paper of this section by Bin Wu and Jules Pretty analyses social con-
nectedness in a marginal rural region of China. Despite remarkable recent achieve-
ments, rural poverty still presents significant challenges in China. Poverty is
particularly endemic in marginal areas characterized by problems of both poor
asset stock (natural, physical and human capital) and the scarcity of capital inflows
(e.g. in terms of finance, technology, information and talent). If there is to be a
breakthrough for rural development in these marginal areas, then agricultural
innovation is widely viewed as a necessary condition. Yet technological innovation
is constrained by the difficulties that formal agricultural extension finds in reach-
ing remote and inaccessible areas. This lack of communication and interaction