Something's Wrong Somewhere:
Globalization, Community and
the Moral Economy of the Farm Crisis

Author: Christopher Lind
Format: Paperback
Publish Date: June 1995
ISBN-10: 1895686490
ISBN-13: 9781895686494
List Price: $12.95
Publisher: Fernwood Books Ltd website »

Available from:

• amazon.ca
• See also: Study Guide here »

"I look around town and I see how tough things are, with all the houses vacant, people leaving friends they grew up with and all of a sudden, they are gone trying to make a go of it elsewhere..." - anonymous farmer

When he interviewed Saskatchewan farmers about the farm crisis, Christopher Lind found that four general moral categories or themes emerged from the conversations. They are: the significance of agriculture for national sovereignty; the need for cooperation amid the loss of community; the crisis in the family who farms; and the increasing sense of powerlessness. All of these categories, Lind contends, have to do with different aspects of community.

The farm crisis is more than an economic crisis. It is a moral and ethical crisis brought on by the ethic of competitiveness, domination, and indifference which is the ethic of the new world order "globalization." Lind's analysis shows how this ethic emerged - how the moral economy has been replaced by the market economy - and how it is destroying the farm community, the environment, and national sovereignty. If this destructive trend is to be reversed, this ethic must be replaced with one of cooperation, solidarity, and compassion.

While this study focuses on Saskatchewan farms, farmers from across Canada will recognize the similarities with their situation and will identify with the voices of their Saskatchewan brothers and sisters."

Compass: A Jesuit Journal. 13.6 (Jan-Feb 1996): 27-8. General OneFile. Gale. University of Toronto. 31 Oct. 2008. Full Text:Copyright 1996 Compass Foundation. See review website (paid subscription) here »

In this short but most useful book, Christopher Lind, professor of church and society at St. Andrew's College in Saskatoon, links globalization and the continuing farm crisis in Saskatchewan.

He recounts how, by 1993, up to 50 per cent of the farmers in many of Saskatchewan's rural municipalities had appeared before government farm debt review boards - appearances that only occur once creditors have announced their intention to foreclose. Predictably, the human cost for those involved is exhibited in increased levels of stress, family breakdown, domestic violence, alcohol abuse and even suicide. Saskatchewan has also seen a continuing loss of both farms and people. [ ... ]

Lind links these developments, including the devastating 20 percent interest rates of the early 1980s, to globalization, which he describes as "a powerful new social reality that rearranges the power structure in our society. It has reinforced the power and enriched the lives of some and threatened the livelihood and impoverished the lives of many others. Since it is a human creation and a social rather than a natural fact, it lies within the realm of human choice. We can support it or resist it....Globalization is now a fundamental moral concern." [ ... ]

While finding hope in movements that oppose globalization and its effects, Lind says that this is a limited response. A more successful strategy involves a conscious attempt by people, in rural Saskatchewan and elsewhere, to build community as a means of restoring the local control and personal dignity that the agents of globalization have wrested from them. This sense of community, he says, must go beyond the limits of family and geographic location to the creation of new and more democratic institutions based on cooperation, solidarity and compassion.

Roedale Institute. A theologian links farming, ethics, and economics
By Constantine Markides

Full text of book review here »

Lind gives an informed, compelling account of the farm crisis in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The book examines the effects of economic globalization on Saskatchewan farmers—arguing that it has transferred power from the farmers to an unregulated global capital market—and offers a moral economic vision to restore sovereignty to farmers and the local community. Lind packs what feels like several books into ninety-three pages. At once a case study, travelogue, history of globalization, moral economic theory and rallying cry, Something’s Wrong Somewhere is an ambitious book with a strong undertone of moral indignation.

Lind does an excellent job describing what is wrong. The introduction and first chapter is replete with graphs and reliable statistics, providing the reader with ammunition to talk in a simple, factual manner about the effects of globalization and to debunk much of the claptrap surrounding it. For example, under globalization and the expansion of industrial agriculture, Saskatchewan experienced unprecedented gains in food production. Advocates of globalization would be quick to point this out. But we find out that, at the same time, more Saskatchewan farmers than ever before were filing bankruptcy and losing their land. This was due in great part to an international trade war between the U.S. and Europe that drove Canadian prices down. In 1991, Canadian farmers received an income for their wheat which, adjusted for inflation, was 19 percent lower than that during the Great Depression. Added costs from increased chemical use and high interest payments on the expensive equipment that industrial agriculture demands also contributed to their income crisis. At first the farmers faulted themselves or the drought or an infestation of grasshoppers. But with soaring production, it soon became clear the blame lay elsewhere. As one Saskatchewan farmer said, “The system is farming the farmers” (p. 26).

[...] Lind suggests farming needs to be re-imagined in terms of friendship with the land rather than husbandry of the land, which to him implies an oppressive patriarchal element.... and ends with a rousing call to build civic society: globalization was made by humans and can be undone by humans; and the way to do it is to intentionally build communities.

As if to urge us on to such a mission, Lind ends the book with a two-page farming parable called “The Parable of the Fences.” It is a unique epilogue for a unique book that gives a vivid picture of what is wrong and where it is wrong. And then some.

The Epilogue from Something's Wrong Somewhere: Globalization, Community and the Moral Economy of the Farm Crisis by Christopher Lind - text/.doc here »

Something's Wrong Somewhere posted to course reading list for Wilfrid Laurier University: TH666D-03 Leadership: Small Congregations in a Rural Context outline here »