Análisis del efecto del buffer en el área que ocupa la zona de máxima

There is no question that privileged class status can facilitate the accumulation of rural property, disengagement from the formal labour market and utilisation of economic networks that support small-scale farming. Economic (dis)advantages bear a significant influence on the ability to buy land, pay administration costs and taxes, make capital investments in new tools and materials, and travel to markets. I have avoided, however, trying to cast back-to-the-land migration as a phenomenon that can be definitively linked to class. Despite connecting some Italian back-to-the-landers to the country’s growing ‘reflexive middle class’ earlier in the chapter, I have been careful to frame this as a background context more than a quantifiable process. In some respects this forms an attempt to explore beyond the literature placing rural in-migration as a middle-class phenomenon connected to post-productivist reimaginings of rural space for leisure, tourism and retirement. It also comes from an inability to honestly apply any kind of categorical class distinction to such a heterogeneous group as my case study farmers, and reflects my reluctance to essentialise back-to-the-landers through such a definition.

In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Gibson-Graham (1996: 59) argue that class identity

‘can be understood as decentred and diverse’, noting that ‘[i]ndividuals may participate in various class processes, holding multiple class positions at one moment and over time.’ What class processes are visible on back-to-the-land farms are certainly diverse and contingent.

WWOOF hosts and their volunteers temporarily enter into a kind of feudal relationship, with agricultural labour exchanged for room and board, but abandon this structure at the end of an

agreed period. As I demonstrate in Chapter 8, ‘pluriactive’ back-to-the-landers can and do work simultaneously as wage labourers, capitalist entrepreneurs and semi-subsistence farmers.

The shifting activities and relative economic power of the case study farmers demands a perspective which looks beyond upper, middle and working classes. In Table 6.1, the professional backgrounds of interviewees suggests middle to upper-middle income strata. What this does not say, however, is how these nominal positions relate to power and exploitation, the class processes that influence more formalised relations. They give a superficial impression of socio-economic status but that impression is complicated by some basic facts about the back-to-the-landers’ day-to-day lives. Upon becoming farmers, for example, they take greater control over the means of production. Yet in all cases examined for this research, the back-to-the-landers earned less income than they had while they were working in structured employment, when their control over the means of production was weaker. Despite becoming farmer-entrepreneurs, rather than contracted workers, many have become worse off in terms of financial assets. Using annual incomes as a measure, it is highly likely that several would be considered poor. This is a highly relative form of poverty, however, and one which back-to-the-land migrants adopt willingly. The innovative methods by which new farmers learn to work within and outside of the formal economy (a subject of more direct scrutiny in Chapter 8) reveal the flexibility of economic positions that back-to-the-landers adopt. Prohibitive land prices, for example, might be seen from a more rigid perspective as restricting back-to-the-land migration to particular economic classes. Evidence from this study, however, uncovers a number of opportunities for people with limited assets.

When asked about obtaining land, several interviewees remarked that rural property in Italy was until the mid-1990s sold at ‘agricultural prices’. What this means is that post-productivist development occurred slightly later in Italy than in other western European countries, but when it did it brought significantly increased land prices. Prior to the 1990s, back-to-the-landers could purchase rural (and often abandoned) properties under the expectation that the land would be restored to agricultural productivity. Many did precisely this, and in keeping with their counter-cultural dispositions, engineered their farms toward self-sufficient (rather than market-focused) ends. Currently, Italian rural property is often marketed for its potential as a retirement space, holiday home destination, speculative real estate investment or tourist attraction. At the La Dolce Vita trade fair that I visited in London in 2009, these post-productivist imaginings of the rural were given far more attention than any agricultural

potential of the land (although the food produced in the countryside was promoted as one the key draws of rural Italy). The post-1980s upswing in rural land prices can certainly act as a deterrent to those hoping to make a back-to-the-land transition, particularly given the limited financial rewards of small-scale, independent farming. Of the WWOOF volunteers interviewed, each one cited the expense of land as an obstacle to leaving the city for a rural smallholding, while 62% of respondents to the WWOOF volunteer questionnaire listed land prices as a factor that would dissuade them from taking up organic farming later. Such an anxiety is validated by the experiences of some of the back-to-the-landers interviewed. Those who arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s are, on the evidence I have been able to gather, able to maintain a semi-subsistence household economy where food is provided almost entirely from their land or through bartering, and cash transactions are few. Tanya and David, on the other hand, took a mortgage on their Umbrian property in 2006 and underestimated the living costs they would incur, necessitating more time spent accumulating money in the formal economy than working the land. All of this points toward a condition in which plentiful upfront capital is required to embark on back-to-the-land migration, thus restricting who can undertake it.

There are nonetheless some opportunities to strike a balance between the overstretched mortgage and paid-off parcel of abandoned land. Elisa and Romano, for instance, have never owned a property and turned to organic farming when another business enterprise was liquidated. Unable to find an affordable property to buy in Emilia-Romagna, they located a semi-abandoned farm house, made inquiries about the owner and eventually tracked him down to Bologna. He had inherited the property and was not interested in using it for farming, so negotiated a very favourable rent at which they could take over the farm and restore the land to productivity. Somewhat similarly, while still working in Geneva, Sebastian was put in touch through a mutual contact with Giorgio and Margarete, former back-to-the-landers who have since moved into an apartment in Città della Pieve, letting Sebastian take control of the farm for a very small rent. These outcomes are, of course, due in large part to luck. They serve to illustrate, though, that rural real estate prices are not in all cases a prohibitive factor for aspiring back-to-the-landers.

For those who face the greatest financial barriers to an independent back-to-the-land lifestyle, communal projects offer a relatively low-cost option. Theoretically, one could begin as a volunteer (through an organisation like WWOOF) in an agrarian community and gradually work toward full-time residence. Klara, a WWOOFer with ambitions of starting her own farming project, has periodically considered moving to a community farm but has held back on account of the commitment it will require. Likewise Madeleine, another WWOOFer who acknowledges the prohibitive costs of buying farmland, sees membership of an agrarian community as one possible option but a less preferable one to owning her own farm. Joining such a project as a newcomer usually involves a subordination of individual lifestyle preferences to group standards, given that an intentional community’s longevity can often be dependent on adherence to behavioural rules. Walter, who spent time among intentional communities in Tuscany in the 1970s, suggests that the conformity required by such groups (despite many flaunting non-conformist pronouncements) is likely to make many dalliances with the communities short-lived. Hierarchies form and ‘gurus’ emerge despite a group’s best intentions to the contrary, he argues, resulting in personal conflicts and a high drop-out rate. Another potential problem lies in the fact that the communities’ efforts toward collective self-sufficiency can mean that members have little contact with a cash economy. This could be troublesome for those using the communities as a stepping stone to an individual back-to-the-land project, since there is little opportunity to accumulate savings unless one commutes to a part-time job off the farm site.

Despite these concerns, there are examples of long-running agrarian communities in Italy, including ecovillages and cooperatives, which are democratically organised, unaffiliated to religious or political sects, regulated by WWOOF protocol and welcoming to newcomers, such as the Commune di Bagnaia in Tuscany and Valli Unite in Piedmont. These and other similar groups offer opportunities to experiment with back-to-the-land living for those that might not otherwise afford it. In the UK, Pickerill and Maxey (2009) have explored how low-impact development projects, such as ecovillages, have been enacted with small amounts of surplus capital. These should be considered part of a new phase in the back-to-the-land narrative, one which utilises new technologies, responds to historically specific political conditions and draws on a discourse of sustainability influenced by contemporary concerns such as peak oil and climate change.

When an individual, family or other group moves, with ethically guided motives, to the countryside and adopts an agricultural lifestyle, their subsequent economic and social activities rarely fall into any pattern that suggests a class dynamic engendering conflict or exploitation.

Evidence from this fieldwork therefore runs contrary to some 1990s research on migration into rural areas, discussed in Chapter 2, in which middle-class incomers were seen as altering the character of the countryside through conspicuous consumption, NIMBYism and aloofness. On all the farms where I volunteered, the hosts seemed to socialise most frequently with other farmers rather than other in-migrants from urban professional backgrounds. In some cases social networks involved other back-to-the-landers but just as much time was spent with locals from multi-generational farming families. Consumption habits varied, from predominantly market-based to mostly self-sufficient, with prior professional status or asset wealth an unreliable indicator of these practices.

None of this is to suggest that integration into rural Italian communities is always a smooth process for newcomers; indeed, one interviewee’s remarks in the next chapter indicate that

‘outsider’ status may be carried like a stigma for some back-to-the-landers, no matter how sincere their efforts to adopt Cloke et al.’s (1998b) ‘cultural competencies’. Nor is it correct to imply that all back-to-the-landers possess such competencies to a degree that should immediately distinguish them from middle-class migrants of a less agrarian orientation. As I argue in Chapter 7, the process of becoming a farmer involves a very slow transition, one that could even be considered perpetual. The fact remains, however, that the everyday actions of back-to-the-landers are usually directed toward ends that imagine a future based on non-exploitative relationships of care and solidarity. As I argue in the next chapters, these values are expressed in the methods of production used on the case study farms and in some of the novel systems of exchange fostered by the AAFNs in which back-to-the-landers participate.

In this respect, the voluntary poverty adopted by back-to-the-landers is a reflection of the moral choices articulated in Section 6.2. Hypothetically, by controlling the means of production (especially over something so vital as food) independent farmers are in a position to maximally exploit those who desire their produce, and the landless workers (such as WWOOF

volunteers) who assist with production. The emotional and ethical rationales by which many back-to-the-landers make decisions, however, instead guide them toward systems of exchange, such as collective buying groups (Chapter 8), where market norms are subordinate to principles of mutual benefit. Moral reasoning in economic choice is also evident in decisions which invert the modern urban condition of being ‘asset rich, time poor’. Lifestyles based around a slow ethic engender a surplus of time that is regarded as more desirable than a surplus of assets.

Critics might argue that choosing time over material assets is only available to those comfortably nested within a certain standard of living, one that is not under serious threat of absolute impoverishment. There is some truth in this, and back-to-the-land as a lifestyle choice does indeed seem an unlikely one for those suffering the most abject material poverty.

Yet work by Shiva (1989) in India and Gibson et al. (2010) in the Philippines shows a resistance among notionally poor rural communities to sacrifice semi-subsistence economic systems for waged labour, despite its seductive promise of improved living standards and increased cash assets. This is largely due to the support of ‘other’ economies that exist within these social structures, such as domestic work and child care. A proletarianised countryside sacrifices the time it can spare for these social supports, and back-to-the-land migration can be seen as one way of reclaiming them.

This may not be a satisfying view for those who demand more concrete results from projects described as ‘radical’ or ‘alternative’. Recalling McCarthy’s (2006: 809) statement that few alternative agro-food networks are ‘so alternative that they eschew the circulation of capital in commodity form altogether’, the back-to-the-land practices recorded in this study might be considered alternative only to a limited degree. They embody what Goodman and Goodman (2007) refer to as ‘transformative potential’ in prefiguring alternative systems of production and exchange, but it is difficult to measure what kinds of transformation – beyond the strictly personal – have actually been brought into being. This does not give cause to dismiss these practices as insignificant, however. Certainly, as I want to emphasise throughout, they cannot be written off as a middle-class dalliance with temporary poverty and self-reliance that demands no risk or hard graft. On this point I am strongly in agreement with Parkins and Craig (2006: 85), who in writing on the slow movement, argue that

…the mindful consciousness that we position as central to slow living generates an awareness of the specificity of place, and more particularly a material relationship with the land, as well as an attentiveness to those who co-exist in the same

territory…This is not based upon a bourgeois, romantic valorization of either rural life or small, sophisticated towns in exotic locales, but is rather based upon a belief that in the contexts of our fast, deterritorialized modern lives, we need to retain an ethical and political disposition that is grounded in an awareness of our fundamental relationships to the specificity of place, the land, its produce and each other.

In outlining a case for a revised class analysis, I am aware that doing so may be interpreted as glossing over material inequalities. This is not my intention, and as I stated at the beginning of this section, it is an undeniable fact that a surplus of money can assist back-to-the-land migration while a lack of it can restrict mobility and limit the achievement of certain aims which require significant financial investment. Rather, my aim in adopting Gibson-Graham’s (1996) non-categorical perspective on class is to emphasise the contingency of back-to-the-landers’ socio-economic relationships. This should serve as something of a corrective to earlier studies on urban to rural migration which counterpose class categories and construe conflict from this relationship. In demonstrating that those who occupy a lower income strata may not be prevented from adopting a back-to-the-land lifestyle, I would argue against any tendency to see back-to-the-land migration as a predominantly middle-class phenomenon, even if the professional backgrounds of the research participants in this study encourage such a conclusion. More importantly, it is vital to understand the economic position of these case study farmers as being multiple and conditional based on spatio-temporal contexts. In the case of Elisa and Romano, for instance, their careers in environmental engineering were short-lived, to the extent that they have never had sufficient assets to buy a property or amass much of a savings surplus. Superficially, however, their qualifications and backgrounds might suggest a middle-class level of wealth. Class distinctions, then, should be applied cautiously, and always with an understanding of their diverse manifestations. In particular, class descriptors as I have used them in this chapter should not imply structural class processes and their associated tensions. Instead, diverse and contingent understandings of class might imply relative economic (dis)advantage, but such positions are conditional upon other factors as well. A back-to-the-lander with ample assets does not necessarily make a good farmer, and his or her longevity in the countryside might well be determined by abilities that have little to do with finance. What, then, are the other obstacles to transforming an agrarian impulse into a realistic strategy for lifestyle change? On the other hand, what enablers exist and are these

sufficient to make back-to-the-land migration a possibility for a wide span of demographic categories? These questions are addressed throughout the following chapters.

6.5. Conclusion

As I have argued above, back-to-the-land migration in contemporary Northern Italy is defined by both consistencies and contradictions. There is enough common ground amongst the migrants to establish a general profile of would-be or current back-to-the-landers. They generally possess high levels of formal education and many have achieved considerable professional prestige. They are, however, frustrated with work and the demands that formal urban economies impose. Key among these is a work/life balance heavily tilted toward the former. Back-to-the-land migration allows a chance to experiment with alternative ways of dwelling and living – alternative to what the migrants have done before, and when ethically or politically motivated, alternative to what they believe to be a mainstream or conformist lifestyle. A desire for independence, usually conceived as a disengagement from formal employment and steps toward greater self-sufficiency, is key to understanding why people go back-to-the-land.

Within these commonalities, though, lie numerous inconsistencies. For one, there is good reason to note the distinct experiences of ‘agriculture’ for different genders, given that for women the adoption of this lifestyle may imply a strongly increased domestic burden with little actual farmwork. Additionally, there are pronounced differences in the commentary of those who began farming in rural Italy before the 1990s, and those who arrived subsequently.

Unsurprisingly, these differences tend to be largely predicated on factors such as age, nationality and relative wealth. Futhermore, while many back-to-the-landers share certain motivations in common, where their inspirations diverge, their approach to farming is likely to follow suit. Someone following predominantly gastronomic goals may configure their

Unsurprisingly, these differences tend to be largely predicated on factors such as age, nationality and relative wealth. Futhermore, while many back-to-the-landers share certain motivations in common, where their inspirations diverge, their approach to farming is likely to follow suit. Someone following predominantly gastronomic goals may configure their