Land matters and the future of farming

Another Life: Waiting for the kettle to boil, I counted all the poles I can see from the kitchen window: 28 of them, electrical and telegraphic, marching their separate ways through the fields and up the road. Below a brand-new clachan of bungalows at the brow of the hill, a timber wigwam sketches the next house for sanction, its heights and angles bright against the slope of ancient lazy-beds. In the mornings, my neighbours drive off to build more houses in town, leaving the hillside to the clamour of the lambs.

There could be years in it yet, as the swelling core of affluence commands more holiday and retirement homes in the west, and a rising population spills out to the regions. Construction pay-packets help to build marital homes for rural sons and daughters. Marginal farmers with scenic sites find that they can, after all, eat the view. What happens after the building bonanza - whether other jobs will really be there - will depend, I suppose, on comparative costs in Castlebar and Cracow.

As for the land, "Farming is like ironing underpants - a pointless exercise" - or so a young Bantry man assured sociologist Ethel Crowley, providing her with an opening line for a book that certainly finds its moment. Land Matters: Power Struggles in Rural Ireland (Lilliput, €14.99) confronts the crisis of respect for farming, and the loss of faith in its future, that is undermining so much of life on the land.

Its author lectures in sociology in Trinity College and many of her readers will be students; others can skip the more arcane excursions into theory. For anyone concerned with rural Ireland, her scrutiny of structures, policies and directives that now shape farming life is a great resource in itself, helping to show, for example, how the Nitrates Directive has engendered "a climate of fear" among many farmers as "yet another way for the EU to make their lives difficult". Its radical edge and popular voice help to make the book, as I suggest in its foreword, uncommon "sociology-with-attitude". Dr Crowley's own farming background in west Cork has left her out of sympathy with the "green capitalism" of wealthy, intensive farmers tied to "productivism" and pollution. In her eyes, the old Common Agricultural Policy was a "grossly exploitative and unequal system" creating a two-tier rural Ireland.

Even the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) may do some ecological good, but counts for little, she suggests, in the long-term survival of small to medium-sized farmers: "It provides a minimal income," judges Dr Crowley, "firstly to help quell social unrest, and secondly to ensure that they can continue to serve as consumers of the goods produced by capitalism." Long kitchen conversations with 60 REPS farmers showed, in passing, how rarely the scheme's wider environmental purpose had any real significance. "At best," she writes, "it encourages small farmers to, as many of them said, 'tidy up the place' or 'clean up their act'. It is also a vehicle for the social control of the smaller farmer by the State."

The complex interaction - and often conflict - between the global and the local is one of the book's big themes, illustrated by its case-study of the social dynamics of west Cork. In no region of Ireland is there such a lively mix of groups with competing claims and interests: farmers, hoteliers, incomers, conservationists and second-home owners all live cheek-by jowl. Along with tourist earnings of some €80 million a year has come an extraordinary development of gourmet food products - notably the west Cork cheeses - based on local resources.

Such "distinctive" regional products were, in fact, the inspiration of German, Dutch and English settlers over the past 20 years, and the markets for the "Fuchsia" brands are those of a globalised demand for quality organic food. Many of these producers were fleeing the world of supermarkets and globalisation to what they hoped would be a simple, local, low-input life on the land.

One small group of such settlers has pursued (often in parallel with orthodox economic lives) the "alternative" experiment of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), trading goods and services on a barter basis and using their own currency as an alternative to cash. This belongs very much to the movement of bioregionalism, in which communities build their own local economies and ecologies independently of globalised forces: local farmers' markets express the same impulse of defiance.

But the spread of LETS, as Dr Crowley points out, is itself a product of globalisation - of international networking and computer contact. In sociological terms, its shifting membership is typical of "neo-tribes" - new nodes of belonging and shared idealisms. Members of the growing constellation of such groups concerned with the future of the Irish countryside - often "left-field and countercultural" - are themselves, she suggests, a neo-tribe, and through infectious enthusiasm, they "now have the ear of bureaucrats and politicians at the highest level". One will wait for the evidence.