Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer - 1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem - 2. Overpopulation and Soil Erosion
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter ii. Southern Plantation Economy 231
expert opinion. In a sense, this is one of the most discouraging things about
Southern agriculture, that the faults have been recognized and the remedial
plans worked out for such a long time without much being accomplished
at least up to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
The revolutionary changes within the last decade—and particularly the
effects of the A.A.A. on rural Negroes—^are less well-known. We shall
leave those latest developments to be analyzed in the next chapter. In this
chapter we want, mainly by way of presenting some illustrative quantitative
relations, to give a short survey of the familiar topics: the plight of the
rural South and of the Negro farmer.
2. Over-population and Soil Erosion
Rural farm areas in the United States in 1940 had a population of about
30,0CX),000. More than half of this population, or over 16,000,000, was in
the South 5
and over one-fourth of the Southern farm population (around
4,500,000) was Negro. But the South had only 35 per cent of all land in
farms in the country, and the value of this farm land, as well as of the
buildings on the land, the farm implements and machinery, constituted but
28 per cent of the national figure. Only 8 per cent of the Southern farm
land was operated by Negro owners, tenants, and croppers, and their share
in the value of Southern farms, buildings, implements, and machinery was
equally small.^ For the rest, Negroes participated in the Southern agricul-
tural economy only as wage laborers, at low wages and usually without the
assurance of year-round employment.
The import of these broad facts is as simple as it is significant. They are
behind all the rural poverty of the South. The agricultural South is over-
populated,*^ and this over-population affects Negroes much more than
whites. This applies particularly to the Old South, including the Delta
district, which contains the main concentration of Negroes. In this Black
Belt the over-population has—on the whole—been steadily increasing.
“Since i860 the amount of land in southeastern farms has remained station-
ary, new lands being cleared about as rapidly as old land* was exhausted,”®
while the number of male agricultural workers in the same area rose from
around 1,132,000 in i860 to 2,102,000 in 1930."^
A cultural heritage from times of pioneering, colonization, and slavery
makes the conditions even worse than can be visualized by the ratio of
population to land alone. The early colonists and the later land speculators
did not have to economize in their use of the land. To the ante-bellum
* It is true that countries like Denmark have a much higher population density in their
agricultural areas but, nevertheless, preserve a much higher living level. But both objec-
.ive market conditions and the rural culture are incomparably more favorable than they
can be, in the surveyable future, in Southern agriculture. Our term ^^over-population” has
the pragmatic meaning indicated by this observation.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
