DEVELOPMENT: Rural Residents Confront Ghost-Town Fate

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 15 2001 (IPS) - The 400 people of Irazusta, a town in eastern Argentina, anxiously await the arrival of weekend visitors from the cities, part of an effort to halt rural emigration to the country’s urban centres, an exodus that has led 650 other towns to extinction.

Irazusta, located in Entre Ríos province, 290 km north of Buenos Aires, is the site of a development project led by the non-governmental organisation Responde, which is attempting to prove that the inhabitants of small towns can find new reasons to stay where their social and family roots are.

Responde also has programmes underway to connect these scattered villages through an on-line network, create micro-enterprises and bring in professionals who volunteer their time to train rural dwellers in a wide variety of jobs, such as hair stylist, electrician, medical assistant or pastry-maker.

In Irazusta, some 40 families are involved in receiving travellers from the cities. They provide the visitors with rooms in their own homes and offer traditional local meals, excursions on horseback or in horse-drawn carts, an evening at the town’s social club and a visit to the ‘pulpería’, or tavern of the sort that was very common in the 19th century – and which can still be found in Argentina’s far-flung villages.

“This is not ‘ranch tourism’, with the comfort of a five-star hotel,” as is being offered in other regions, pointed out Marcela Zuccotti, coordinator of Responde’s volunteer organisation.

“The value of the visit lies in getting to know country folk who resist emigrating to the city, and to share a time with them that, undoubtedly, passes at a much slower pace than ours” in the big urban centres, Zuccotti told IPS.

She explained that at first organisers were worried that these visits did not offer enough, and that the accommodations should be improved. But they discovered that the tourists, most of whom are unaccustomed to small town routines, truly enjoyed experiencing this “other” life, one that is peaceful, friendly and unpolluted.

Zuccotti is currently focusing on one positive aspect of this experiment: the satisfaction of the tourists, which in turn contributes toward building the self-esteem of the Irazusta residents. Most of the townspeople had been left without any prospects for developing their community or had suffered rejection and failure when they attempted to move to the city.

The people of Irazusta have grown restless since the Responde programme began. One woman who will serve as guide anxiously awaits the arrival of the visitors, one group is busy cooking, while others check on the details for the planned visits to the ‘pulpería’ or to the ancient train station – which has long been abandoned.

On Saturday nights, the locals organise dinners at the town’s social club, serving typical regional dishes, followed by dances and musical performances by local and guest artists.

“German immigration played a major role in Irazusta, and there are two women here who make German pastries and offer tea at their house for anyone who cares to visit on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon,” Zuccotti pointed out.

The Irazusta development project came about as the result of an academic study that showed the principal causes of rural emigration to be the interruption of railroad service, the closing of farming establishments, the concentration of land ownership and the mechanisation of farming practices.

Chaco province, in Argentina’s northeast, is one example of this dynamic, as the arrival of the combine harvester reduced the number of workers needed to bring in the annual cotton harvest from 70,000 to 10,000 – this despite the expansion of the cotton plantations.

Geographer and sociologist Marcela Benítez, president of Responde, commented that the initial objective of the study was purely academic, an attempt to identify the reasons motivating the exodus from rural areas to the cities.

But direct contact with the residents of approximately 100 towns led Benítez to make a commitment to taking social action and focusing on new goals.

“When I began the research seven years ago, I collected data from all the towns with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants and compared it with the data recorded by the national population censuses of 1980 and 1991,” Benítez told IPS.

“With just that step I saw there were 450 towns that had substantially decreased their population,” and in some cases the villages had all but disappeared, she said.

Benítez’s projections indicate that the new census, to be conducted this year, will show that some 650 towns have very few people left, or that they have been abandoned. In Argentina, the national population census takes place every 10 years.

“I found towns with 15 residents that were no longer sustainable,” said the Responde president. Those villages are the ones that will not appear in the new census, she added.

Most of the towns that disappear are concentrated, paradoxically, in Argentina’s most agriculturally developed region: the central Pampa, home to the best grazing land for cattle, and extensive wheat, maize, soy and sunflower production, the countries leading export crops.

On a driving tour of the region, this IPS correspondent came across a pregnant woman walking beside the road. The 22-year-old resident of Rojas, a town of just 15 people, had set out hoping someone would give her a ride to a medical centre for her pre-natal exam.

“For the birth, I have to go in two weeks beforehand,” to the hospital located 70 km from Rojas, said the woman. This way she hopes to avoid complications arising from an early birth in her hometown, where there is no nurse to assist her or the baby.

Benítez says that in the Pampa region alone there are 275 town on the verge of disappearing, due mainly to the process of concentrating land ownership in the hands of a few, which has reduced the number of small farms here from 170,000 to 116,000 over the last decade.

The rural population loss is rarely, if ever, covered by the major media – which is why Benítez’s study has been much applauded: it has brought to light the magnitude of a problem that is repeated and expanding silently throughout this country and others.

The Responde president recounted the colourful story published in a Buenos Aires daily about a town in the southern province of Neuquén that had been sold to an individual buyer for 5,000 dollars.

The town was “Los Catetos, which until 1989 had a stone quarry. When that closed, 150 people lost their jobs,” she said.

Once a town’s main source of employment disappears, the railroad and the bank usually close soon afterwards. Then the residents might lose their only gasoline station, and services such as electricity, gas and telephone, and even their local health centre.

“In at least one town, the doctor left one day and was never replaced,” said Benítez.

Another example of the negative impacts of small town isolation is the case of pensioners in Chivilcoy, in the province of Buenos Aires. To receive their meagre monthly stipend, the retirees must find someone to take them to the closest town with a bank and then wait long hours to catch a bus back home.

Even though they are largely abandoned to fate, many residents of Argentina’s small towns prefer to stay where they are because the alternative of moving to the city would entail the stress of pulling up social roots and the double alienation of being poor and an outsider.