농촌 빈곤층의 가혹한 삶

A green and pleasant land, unless you're caught in the trap of rural poverty. Photograph: NTPL/John Miller

It's hard to imagine a time in which it's been tougher to live in the countryside. It's not just a question of the usual complaints: that access to services – transport, hospitals, schools, even mobile phone coverage or broadband – is patchy. It's not just the fact that the countryside is suddenly vulnerable to all sorts of diseases: to ash dieback, to bovine TB and the Schmallenberg virus. It's that there's acute poverty in rural areas and it's a poverty that is seemingly invisible.

At least one-quarter of all farming families live on or below the official poverty line and, as the Observer reports today, many endured a rough 2012. The levels of borrowing that farmers require in order to run their businesses is mind-boggling; it's not uncommon for farmers to have debts well into six figures. The cost of animal feed seems to rise exponentially each year (an almost 40% increase in the two years I've been breeding pigs). The weather means many of us grew nothing other than a bumper crop of slugs last year, while the paperwork required for livestock is byzantine.

Farming used to be a communal activity, involving dozens of people sharing the highs and lows. Now, it can often be a lonely, isolated career. Farmers are often proud, private and practical people; their instinct is that an animal in distress should be put out of its misery. Little wonder that suicide rates among them are some of the highest in the country.

There are many areas of the rural economy not involved in farming. But the situation there is, if anything, even more stark. Whole villages and towns are disconnected from the land that surrounds them. I frequently meet schoolchildren in my small town in Somerset who don't know that eggs come from chickens. When rustic knowledge has been so eroded, the classic consolations of the countryside disappear and people no longer forage for food or fuel. (Most housing estates don't have open fires, let alone woodburners.)

The average wage for people working in rural communities is nearly £5,000 lower than the national average, yet house prices in the shires are astronomically high because demand to live in the supposedly bucolic countryside is stoked by dippy TV programmes and urban dinner parties. Poverty is always a tragedy, but at least urban poverty is well documented and is often, in music and film, glamorised. The streets are tough, but they're thought cool, even cutting edge. The rural poor are still considered yokel and backward, in the unlikely event they're considered at all.

There are many reasons for the invisibility of the rural poor. The most obvious is that agricultural workers (and this is, sadly, a self-portrait) have a similar appearance to the stereotype of the homeless or needy: muddy boots, ripped jumper, unshaven, possibly smelling of dung or dirt. A wayfarer or tramp is, simply, well camouflaged out here. But the invisibility is also down to the old chestnut of class: the British countryside is still identified, in the national psyche, with the nobility, with the landed gentry and with well- spoken squires. People persist in idealising (or demonising) it as a place of horsey types and manor houses. The reality is that it's a place of yeomen who've left the land and who often can't make ends meet as decorators or plumbers.