THE imposing synagogue on Main Street in Greenville, with its classical portico, raised cupola and shimmering stained glass, was built in 1906 to accommodate several hundred worshippers. In a good week these days, a custodian says, 12 people show up for Friday service, and several of them are in their 90s. The four classrooms for religious instruction now cater to just three children. The rest of the Jewish community has died or drifted away to other, richer parts of the country.

It is not just Jews who have left the Delta, a fertile alluvial plain in Mississippi and adjacent parts of Arkansas and Louisiana. Since 1940, the region’s population has fallen by almost half. In some counties it has fallen by much more (see map). That makes it the most glaring example of a growing trend around the country: rural depopulation. Over the past two years the total population of rural America has fallen for the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking it in the 1970s, albeit by just a fraction. The majority of rural counties—1,261 out of a total of 1,976—had shrinking headcounts.

Between 2000 and 2010 alone, Greenville lost 17% of its residents. In the poor black neighbourhoods that surround the centre of town, many of the decrepit “shotgun” houses are abandoned, their boarded-up windows and doors almost totally obscured by untended vines. The town centre itself is nearly as run-down, with more vacant shopfronts than occupied ones. On the levee that protects the city from the Mississippi, the huge painted letters reading “The heart and soul of the Delta” are fading.

It is the same throughout the region. Sam Angel, a lifelong resident of Lake Village, the administrative and commercial centre of Chicot County, just across the river in Arkansas, says he can remember when the shops in town stayed open until ten o’clock at night on Fridays and Saturdays, to cater to the throngs of farm workers eager to spend their wages. Now there are not really any shops at all: just a pharmacy, two banks and a few law firms, along with the inevitable pawnbrokers and liquor stores.

The farm jobs have also disappeared, for the most part. Whereas hundreds of labourers would once have been needed to weed, pick and process cotton on the land his family owns, Mr Angel notes, machines now do almost all of that work. Mechanisation, coupled with a desire to escape back-breaking work in the fields, prompted the first wave of emigration, between the 1940s and the 1970s.

More recently local factories have been closing, overcome by foreign competition. Greenwood, another Delta town, lost piano, zipper and tyre factories, among others. Chicot County lost several catfish farms, a factory making catfish feed and another making gloves. The advent of several casinos, two on riverboats and one on dry land, brought some hope of revival to Greenville. But one of them recently closed and the others are bringing fewer visitors and less revenue into the city than residents hoped.

The Delta was already poor before these setbacks, a legacy of slavery. Issaquena County, which has suffered the most severe depopulation, had 7,224 slaves in 1860 and just 587 whites. Its total population today is 1,386. Their average income is just over $10,000, half the level for Mississippi as a whole, and 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is 17%, more than twice the national rate. The entire county has ten private businesses (other than farms), employing just 99 people. Like the region as a whole, it suffers from low rates of education and high rates of obesity and diabetes.

“You can’t out-poor the Delta,” says Christopher Masingill, joint head of the Delta Regional Authority, a development agency. In parts of it, he says, people have a lower life expectancy than in Tanzania; other areas do not yet have proper sanitation. Persistently poor places, in turn, naturally experience high levels of emigration, says John Cromartie of the Department of Agriculture, as people leave in search of a better life. It is not just the lack of jobs, points out John Green of the University of Mississippi: even those trained in fields where openings are available, such as nursing, say they would rather move away, to provide their families with better schools and greater opportunities.

Local officials talk optimistically of reviving the Delta’s economy. Mr Masingill predicts a resurgence of manufacturing, thanks to the region’s cheap labour, plentiful land and bountiful natural resources. But local businessmen complain that because of poor health and education, the Delta’s workers are not up to snuff. Mr Angel of Lake Village prefers to hire itinerant Mexican labourers, rather than locals, to man his cotton gin, for example. Moreover, manufacturing in rural areas has suffered an especially severe decline in recent years, presumably because it tends to be of the low-tech sort most vulnerable to foreign competition.

Others pin their hopes on tourism, tied to the many blues musicians and civil-rights activists from the region. Gus Johnson, the owner of Jim’s Café, one of the few businesses still open in downtown Greenville, speaks excitedly about the relative crowds that have begun to show up for the hot tamale festival the city recently started holding each year. But the Delta’s seedy and semi-derelict towns are not exactly alluring. And jobs in tourism tend not to pay well, notes Stephen King of Delta State University.

In the long run, says David Jordan, a state senator from Greenwood, education must improve dramatically for the Delta to regain its footing. But struggling Delta counties and cities, with small tax bases, find it hard to raise money for schools. Mississippi spends less per student on education than all but four other states. It has a law that directs extra funds to schools in poor counties, but has not complied with it, Mr Jordan complains, shortchanging the neediest spots by a billion dollars over the past four years. In all the states of the region and at the federal level, Mr Masingill concedes, budgets for education and development have been getting skimpier.

Mr Jordan sees a pattern of official neglect that dates back decades. It took multiple court battles, he says, to secure proper representation for the black citizens of Greenwood in city government. There are still shortcomings, in his view: a couple of years ago someone shot at his house during the night, and he is not happy with the police investigation. Then he begins to speak of his children. All four went to university, he says proudly; two are doctors. None of them lives in the Delta.