Rural Small Business on Small Town Back Roads

Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles I found this week with news that relates to Rural Business, ending April 11, 2009:

Rural Broadband

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began work this week on its national strategy to bring high-speed broadband internet into every American home.

Under the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus plan, the FCC is responsible for developing a strategy to improve broadband coverage and present it to Congress in February of 2010.

Democracy Now posted the transcript of its interview with Wally Bowen, executive director of the Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) in Asheville, North Carolina.

A journalist and activitist who has worked for fifteen years to establish affordable internet access for citizens in western North Carolina, Bowen has prepared an online resource to help rural communities understand broadband technology options, the various costs, and provides selection criteria for each option.

Click here to read, print and share a “Local Network Cookbook: A Recipe for Launching a Local Broadband Wireless Network.”

With all the discussions about rural broadband, I guess it could be easy to ask why? What’s the big deal? Can wireless internet service really improve a rural community?

Greene County, North Carolina can answer ‘yes’ to that question and provides an interesting case study for other rural communities to take a look at:

“The community showed high rates of poverty, low educational attainment, and outmigration through the 1990s, as declines in the domestic tobacco industry dragged this, “the second most tobacco dependent county in the U.S.,” into economic decline.

But community leaders made a major investment — in local citizens and technology.

Since providing all students grades 6 through 12 with laptop computers, beginning in 2003, and installing an affordable countywide wireless internet system so that those computers are easy to use, there have been remarkable changes.”

Interest in attending college increased in just three years time, with more than 80 percent of the 2006 Senior Class applying to college compared to 28 percent of the 2004 Senior Class.

Wi-Fi availability and technnology training attracted many new businesses after years of negative business growth, and the local government created local social networking sites for its community. You can read more here.

The Rural Economy

The most interesting statistic I saw this week about the US economy was here in my home state of North Carolina.

Apparently payments of unemployment insurance benefits have helped cushion us from the true economic impact of the recession. Without those payments, the e economic statistics and problems would be much worse.

In rural counties where unemployment has been running higher, the economic impact from unemployment insurance is even greater. In a neighboring county of mine, unemployment insurance paid out equalled 5.4% of total wages.

The concern of course is that while job losses and business closings have been in the news for months, the true economic impact of those events won’t be felt until the unemployment insurance for those laid off individuals runs out. When they can no longer pay their bills or spend in their local communities, we will then see the true state of our local and national economies. This is one reason economics experts say the US recession hasn’t ‘bottomed out’ yet.

And to provide an international perspective on economics, you can take a look at an article describing the state of rural businesses in Great Britain, where 80% of rural small businesses in Great Britain say they’ve seen their costs increase at the same time they report a 46% drop in sales.

Global Warming Has Local Impact

Sometimes Global Warming doesn’t seem relevant to rural America. Australia may be far away from us, but its rural communities and farmers are struggling to maintain their way of life and apparently are losing the battle.

The Australia National News reports that times there are especially dire in “Mass Exodus: Rural Town Struggles To Survive.”

“Towns in rural Australia are at risk of dying off as drought and Federal Government policy takes a toll on agriculture and forces a “mass exodus” in some regions.

The town of Deniliquin in south-west New South Wales is the heart of what was once a thriving agricultural region. But after years of drought, water levels in the Murray River are at their lowest in more than a century.

With the Federal Government offering to buy back farmers’ water allocations, some are giving up on agriculture altogether.

Many families and businesses are struggling to survive, prompting a mass exodus from the town.”

The reasons why entire rural communities are dying off or relocated themselves are described in ‘Why Global Warming May Be Fueling Australia’s Fires’ and ‘Australia Fires A Climate Wake Up Call’.

“Some analysts say the fires were predictable and that climate scientists have been warning for years about Australia’s vulnerability to rising temperatures and declining rainfall across much of the nation’s south.

“I would compare this current bushfire event to one of the ghosts in Dickens’ Christmas Carol that visits Scrooge and showed him what his future would be like if he didn’t change his ways,” said professor Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.”

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