The other reason why rural Moldova is slow to develop

In forming an explanation for the cause of undevelopment of rural Moldova, we can always look at the usual suspects. The obvious economic factors are certainly working against development: the low avaliability of resources (natural resources, credit, land, etc.), relatively closed economy and difficulty of selling goods, poor infrastructure, huge administrative and political buearacracy and widespread corruption are all working against rapid growth in rural areas. However, attributing stagnant rural growth in Moldova to this set of issues only is incorrect, and only someone who has experienced Moldova through newspapers and press releases would do so. There are more pervasive, complicating issues surrounding the lack of rural development in Moldova, and I would even argue that Moldova serves as an extreme example of a general tendancy for all rural areas.

Let me begin by saying that we are speaking as much about social and political development as I am about economic development. Economic development, in my opinion, is usually conditioned upon a minimum level of social and political awareness among the population. Social and political awareness are developed (literally) by civil society and the institutions which make it up, with civil society in a position of extreme importance for all aspects of development, rural and otherwise, most importantly in cases in which there is a generally non-functioning centralized government and poor infrastructure. In such a situation, there is an absolute necessity to communicate and cooperate. Individual efforts are often in vain when confrunted by the huge variety of problems that appear in every aspect of life (certainly true in Moldova). Institutions that directly represent people on the local level counterbalance these otherwise confounding factors and provide a forum for them to discuss common problems and create localized solutions. Development without civil society is dependent upon top down change, which is usually wasteful, poorly targeted, and poorly implimented because local concerns are rarely represented and no one is checking to make sure things are happening as they should. The only real solution is bottom up change, which means the development of civil society at the local level.

Unfortunately, once again, there are many factors retarding bottom up development of civil society – the mass exodus of young, educated people from rural areas (and Moldova in general), the ubiquitos communist “the government must fix it” mindset, the lack of trust as a result of the theft and destruction that followed land privitization, and others. These are factors that I will not discuss here, but are certainly common to the problem of poor local institutional development.

I would like to make another argument about why rural Moldova has such an underdeveloped civil society, one as true in Moldova as it is in other countries. In my opinion, the prevelance of traditional behaviors (which occurs most often in rural areas) hinders civil society development because those activites consume so much time. Traditional activities are more prevelant in small towns for several reasons. First, small towns have better reinforcement mechanisms for traditional behavior, conversely punishing non-traditional behavior (by non-traditional, I mean activities which deviate from the norm – of course, today’s deviance may be tomorrows norm). Because “everyone knows everyone elses’ business”, non-traditional behavior is not given enough time to develop. That is, when hidden from public judgement, people are more willing to try such behavior and reinforce the deviancy before “going public” with it, whereas non-traditional behavior which occurs in the open is immediately punished and cannot gain lasting strength. In addition, because of limited information flow in small towns, new non-traditional ideas often don’t even get discussed, and because rural areas are often agriculturally based, the extreme low risk agricultural mindset further restricts the their flow and uptake. So not only is there a very small set of existing non-traditional behaviors to choose from, their integration into society is a long and difficult process. As a result, rural areas tend to be slow to develop and the strength of traditional activities is difficult to challenge.

To have an idea of what is meant by “traditional behaviors”, let me give you some Moldovan examples. Planting corn on small acre/2 acre plots is a traditional activity because the corn is almost always planted at a loss, and has been for several years. Also, you could purchase corn cheaper on the marketplace than producing it yourself, especially using the methods that they use (often without fertilizer, and almost never using herbicides or pesticides). Not working on holidays (of which there are 120 in a year) is another traditional activity that seriously affects people’s productivity. A traditional idea might be that it is shameful to buy a chicken from another person in town, because you should have your own chickens. And the list goes on. These activities hinder development in so many ways it would take a book to write them all, but in the end it is clear there are many and varied.

And so we come to the point of this discussion: being that there are so many traditional behaviors and they are so inefficient, they literally crowd out any time for the creation of an active, healthy civil society. Almost more important than physical time, people spend so much mental time concerned with maintaining the status quo that forming the institutions that make up civil society, even ones that represent their interests, tends to take a back seat. The active reinforcement of traditional ideas often keeps good, efficient ideas out of rural areas even when they are very advantageous to the individual.

Along the same lines, the agricultural lifestyle of Moldovans is also not conducive to institution-building because it is so unstructured, further reducing any plannable free time to meet, discuss, and build an active civil society. Between the crowding out of traditional activities and the non-structured work ours of small farmers, there is literally no room left for civil society (though I must say that the non-structured work ours in agriculture often act as an excuse for people who are really just averse to engaging in non-traditional behavior, even things as simple as meetings).

I could give you a hundred examples of traditional activities “crowding out” non-traditional ones, but I’ll just give you just one. Several grape farmers got together to form a marketing cooperative for table grapes. When they discuss it, everyone is very excited and agrees that the future of grape sales will require them to cooperative in order to sell in larger quantities. The date for the first meeting came around, and one left for the capital, and two others said they were busy planting potatoes. As a reader, you might say “well, this could be as a result of a lot of things: maybe they weren’t really interested in the first place, maybe potatoes are crucial to their existence, maybe they don’t trust the guy who set up the meeting…”. If you are thinking that, your wrong. These people simply decided that planting potatoes (which is not crucial to their existence) is more important than the meeting, because they have not connected this meeting with the formation of the cooperative – they don’t want to go to the meeting, but they’d still like to form the cooperative. Their decision was based both on lack of time, but also skewed priorities based on life-long reinforced ideas about traditional activities (planting potatoes) and non-traditional ones (going to meetings).

I think it is worth mentioning that it is ultimately hard to judge any behavior because it can often have both work and pleasure aspects to it. For example, hoeing a garden by hand might be both a fruitful and enjoyable activity, and even if a rototiller is more efficient some individuals may choose the hoe. However, from my experience I do not think that most people would prefer the inefficient solution to any problem, especially problems which form a part of their livlihoods, as in the case of agriculture in rural areas. So I would say that most often it is a tradition-based mindset that obstructs non-traditional behaviors from entering into practice.

So ultimately there are many reasons why rural Moldova is so slow to develop, but slow development of civil society resulting from the excess time spent on traditional behaviors is certainly one of the main ones. When I return to the United States, it will be interested to put this theory to the test in rural areas there and see how things compare.