RURALE, QUESTIONE. — The term rural question is used to designate that complex of social problems which arise from circumstances of fact and which, even in the modern economic structure of agriculture, manifest themselves, albeit with different aspects and modalities, in very many countries.
These circumstances had, and still have, very varied origins. They depended on the need to combat excessive urbanization or to reward particular categories of citizens, as in ancient Rome, while at the same time creating a barrier of Roman paramilitary population in frontier zones: thus, eminently political and strategic reasons. Today they depend principally on economic motives, such as, for example, the proportion between available land and the rural population, or between the capital factor and the labor factor; or on social reasons, such as the need to raise 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 to an equal degree in the various territories of the world and, in any event, not proportionately to the density of the populations existing in those territories, have produced serious imbalances. Thus a poor distribution of people and capital has arisen, which can be resolved only through an integration of the various human activities and of the populations of the various territories.
On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that, in order to achieve economic and commercial ends, the agricultural enterprise must modify its structure through industrialization and mechanization, owing to the necessity of
reducing costs in the face of competition on international markets. Hence those methods of cultivation in which labor finds less employment. There consequently arise problems of unemployment, especially for the masses of agricultural laborers, and a distrust of large industrialized enterprises, accompanied instead by a tendency toward subsistence agriculture, that is, toward small owner-operated holdings.
In densely populated countries, such as Italy, the rural question may be summed up in a grave dilemma: on the one hand, there is the need to industrialize agriculture, aiming at low production costs, extensive use of machinery, and 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 need to settle on the land the largest possible quantity of rural population living a self-contained life, with the production of various foodstuffs, not large in absolute terms, but sufficient to provide the family with a kind of wage in kind. The first solution entails the relatively smaller employment of unskilled labor, but provides the mass of foodstuffs required for the life of the nation and permits the organization of production based on the collection of products, their preservation and processing, and their preparation for distribution on domestic and foreign markets. The second makes it possible to achieve food self-sufficiency for the individual family and, in general, for the rural classes alone, but it scarcely permits the production of foodstuffs available on the market.
Faced with this dilemma, many governments — such as the Italian government — have preferred the second solution, at least in a substantial part of the country, and hence arises the need for new land arrangements, taking the form of the redistribution of land, land reforms, reforms of agricultural contracts, etc. But even the achievement of such arrangements requires very substantial capital investments, because it is obvious that the mass of land equipment increases to an extremely considerable extent when small holdings are created. On the other hand, since it is difficult to attain naturally the perfect balance between large, medium-sized, and small holdings, as would be desirable and technically rational, the intervention of the public authorities in this field and in this direction may be justified, provided that demagogic influences are avoided as far as possible.
In certain other territories, by contrast, the slow evolution of the agricultural enterprise has made, and continues to make, the incomes that can be derived from it very modest. In general, these territories display extreme poverty among the rural populations, because whether they operate the agricultural enterprise on their own account or find their sustenance by providing their services to the capitalist farmer, the limited extent of rent in the Ricardian sense permits a remuneration of labor wholly insufficient for even the most modest standard of living. On the other hand, landed property concentrated in the hands of a few practically creates a monopolistic regime, with the inevitable consequences of such a regime, while, moreover, the scarcity of incomes obtainable from operating the enterprise minimizes the capital that would be necessary for the evolution of agriculture. Thus, in both cases — that of the direct cultivator and that of the sharecropper or wage laborer — low remuneration corresponds to an extremely low standard of living.
These unfavorable conditions therefore change only in countries where either modest demographic pressure and particular agrological conditions have permitted a rapid evolution of agriculture; or where a considerable mass of capital invested in the land has permitted the emergence and strengthening of a small peasant enterprise which, through rational development and the spread of cooperative and consortium forms among producers, processors, and sellers of products, has achieved an economic and social equilibrium also in relation to the non-rural classes; that is, where that interpenetration of agriculture and industry has occurred which has succeeded in stabilizing the relationship between production and consumption.
The rural question, then, derives, as is apparent, from the poor distribution of people over the surface of the globe and
in its various zones, from the two relationships between available land and the rural population and between the capital factor and the labor factor. And since the determination of these relationships also depends on human intervention, they are susceptible to modification according to the nature of the ends that human beings propose to achieve.
BBL.: D. Zolla, Les questions agricoles d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, Paris 1894; E. Philippovich, La politique agraire, there 1904; A. Souchon, La crise de la main-d'oeuvre en France, there 1914; H. Sée, Esquisse d'une hist. du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, there 1921; P. Caziot, La vérité sur la richesse agricole, there 1924; G. Acerbo, Le riforme agraire del dopoguerra in Europa, Florence 1933; R. Ciasca-D. Perini, Riforme agraire antiche e moderne, edited by the Ministry for the Constituent Assembly, Rome 1946; A. Serpieri, La riforma agraria in Italia, there 1946; id., La struttura sociale dell'agricoltura italiana, there 1945; Mario Ravà