RURAL, QUESTION. - The term rural question is customarily used to designate that complex of social problems which arise from circumstances of fact and which, even in the modern economic organization of agriculture, manifest themselves, albeit with different aspects and modalities, in very many countries.
These circumstances had and still have quite varied origins. They depended on the necessity of combating excessive migration to the cities or of rewarding particular categories of citizens, as in ancient Rome, while at the same time creating a barrier of Roman paramilitary population in border zones: reasons, therefore, of a purely political and strategic nature. Today they depend principally on economic motives, such as, for example, the proportion between available land and rural population, or between the factor of capital and the factor of labor; or on social reasons, such as the necessity of raising the standard of living of particular strata of the rural population.
In reality, the intensification of agriculture and the rise and spread of industry, having not occurred in equal measure in the various territories of the world and, in any case, not in proportion to the density of the populations existing in those territories, have led to serious imbalances. Thus a bad distribution of men and of capital has been created, which cannot be resolved except through an integration of the different human activities and of the populations of the various territories.
On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that the agricultural enterprise, in order to achieve economic and commercial ends, must modify its own structure through industrialization and mechanization, because of the necessity of reducing costs in the face of competition on international markets. Hence those methods of working in which labor finds less employment. From these there therefore derive problems of unemployment, especially with regard to the masses of day laborers, and a distrust of large industrialized undertakings, with a tendency instead toward an agriculture of self-sufficiency, that is, toward small direct owner-cultivated property.
In densely populated countries, such as Italy, the rural question can be summed up in a grave dilemma: on the one hand there is the necessity of industrializing agriculture, aiming toward low production costs, a wide use of machines, mass production to be placed on national and foreign markets and to supply the populations of the cities and in general the non-agricultural classes; on the other hand there is the necessity of fixing to the land the largest possible quantity of rural population living a life of its own, with production of various foodstuffs, not high in an absolute sense, but such as to allow the family a kind of self-wage in foodstuffs. The one solution entails less employment of unskilled labor in a relative sense, but it provides the mass of foodstuffs needed for the life of the nation and permits the organization of production based on the gathering of products, their preservation, processing, and preparation for distribution on domestic and foreign markets. The other makes it possible to achieve the food self-sufficiency of the individual family and in general of the rural classes alone, but it hardly permits the production of foodstuffs available on the market.
Faced with such a dilemma, many governments - such as the Italian one - have preferred the second solution, at least in a good part of the country, and from it has arisen the necessity of new land systems, manifesting themselves through the redistribution of lands, land reforms, agrarian contracts, etc. But even to achieve such systems, very strong investments of capital are required, because it is obvious that the mass of land equipment increases to an extremely considerable extent in the case of the creation of small properties. On the other hand, since it is difficult to achieve naturally the perfect balance between large, medium and small properties, as would be desirable and technically rational, the intervention of public authorities in this field and in this direction can be justified, provided that demagogic influences are avoided as much as possible.
In certain other territories, by contrast, the slow evolution of the agricultural enterprise has rendered and renders quite modest the incomes that can be derived from it. In general, in these territories one notes an extreme poverty of the rural populations, because whether they conduct the agricultural enterprise on their own account, or whether they find sustenance by lending their services to the capitalist operator, the limitedness of rent in the Ricardian sense allows a remuneration of labor wholly insufficient for even a very modest standard of living. On the other hand, landed property concentrated in the hands of a few practically creates a regime of monopoly with the inevitable consequences of this regime, while, further, the scarcity of incomes derivable from the operation of the enterprise minimizes the capital that would be necessary for the evolution of agriculture. So that in both cases, that of the direct cultivator and that of the participant or the wage earner, a low remuneration corresponds to a very low standard of living.
These unfavorable conditions therefore come to be modified only in countries where either the modest demographic pressure and particular agrological conditions have permitted a rapid evolution of agriculture; or an imposing mass of capital invested in the land has permitted the rise and strengthening of a small peasant enterprise, which through a rational evolution and the spread of cooperative and consortial forms, of producers, processors and sellers of products, has achieved an economic and social equilibrium also with respect to the non-rural classes; where, that is, there has occurred that interpenetration between agriculture and industry which has succeeded in stabilizing the relationship between production and consumption.
The rural question therefore derives, as appears, from the bad distribution of men over the surface of the globe and in the various zones from the two relationships between available land and rural population and between the factor of capital and the factor of labor. And since the determining of these relationships also depends on the intervention of man, they are capable of modification according to the nature of the ends that man proposes to achieve.
BBL.: D. Zolla, Les questions agricoles d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, Paris 1894; E. Philippovich, La politique agraire, ibid. 1904; A. Souchon, La crise de la main-d'oeuvre en France, ibid. 1914; H. Sée, Esquisse d'une hist. du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ibid. 1921; P. Caziot, La vérité sur la richesse agricole, ibid. 1924; G. Acerbo, Le riforme agraire del dopoguerra in Europa, Florence 1933; R. Ciasca-D. Perini, Riforme agraire antiche e moderne, edited by the Ministero per la Costituente, Rome 1946; A. Serpieri, La riforma agraria in Italia, ibid. 1946; id., La struttura sociale dell'agricoltura italiana, ibid. 1945;
Mario Ravà