Rural Development

We should instead encourage the countryside to modernise. The idealized vision of rural communities blissfully living together and passing down age old traditions from one generation to the other is long dead. The villagers of today demand jobs and are more than thrilled to be offered one in large-scale production farms or one of the livelihood diversification schemes. Far from being able to support others, subsistence farmers can hardly feed themselves and their families. Exploitation of small plots of land has long proven to be inefficient and in some cases even damaging to the environment. Rural life began to change a long time ago, and the process is inevitable. Without rethinking the role of the rural we will end up condemning rural populations to a life of continuous poverty they can only escape by migrating to the city. This migration may in end prove to be even more dangerous.

We should help the countryside embrace change. There are many ways in which we can help the countryside adapt, yet we also need to accept the fact that any change will be disruptive to some extent. Shock effects, and the negative side-effects that come with them are inevitable, and can only be avoided by simply refusing to see that change will occur whether we want it or not. As for Central and Eastern Europe, the de-collectivization process and liberalization process was indeed painful, yet it was largely demanded by the rural inhabitants themselves. While we do not deny that some people are having a hard time learning how to negotiate these new changes, there are successful models that can be implemented. In Balninkai, Lithuania, a very successful model of grassroots organizing involved people in the decision-making process and helped retrain them for the new environment they were facing. In many parts of Central and Eastern Europe people have voted with their feet and moved away from the countryside in search of better prospects. Change is already here and unless we are prepared to force these people to stay on the land, we should work with it rather than against it.

Rural development initiatives should be applauded. For every example of set-backs, there are many examples of the positive impact that investment has on rural communities. One only need look at Muhammad Yunus, a micro-credit pioneer from Bangladesh and winner of the Noble Peace Prize, to understand the life changing effect that a credit as small as $9 can have on the lives of rural inhabitants. These credits have opened a world of opportunities and hope for rural inhabitants throughout the world and, more importantly, have helped set free their creativity and entrepreneurship. Micro-credit has given the world community a lesson in small-scale management, perseverance and unexpected, yet much needed, financial success.

Those same people who moved to the countryside after financial crises moved right back to the cities upon securing a new job, leaving rural areas for what they thought were much better opportunities. Moving back to the village was not a choice, but rather a survival must. Modernisation of the countryside does not mean that the village could not continue to serve an important role as a social buffer in times of crisis. It means that it might be able to offer a lot more than that: an alternative to city living that could attract people not only in times of crisis. Resisting change means rural areas will continue their plunge into poverty and only reinforce dangerous trends of turning entire rural regions into international labour reserves – a heaven for a series of dangerous abuses such as child labour and prostitution.

Poor areas, particularly rural areas, have already proven to be a great source of conflict, with or without attempts to reform it. If anything, reforms have offered young people alternatives – a job that would keep them from joining guerrilla forces or joining criminal gangs. Subsistence farming is no longer an alternative and certainly does not offer the sense of security that the proposition might have you believe it does. Poverty will always breed insecurity and while solutions may be difficult to find and fraught with failure, we owe it to ourselves at least to try.

Trying to fix the countryside in some “traditional” remote past could only be done at huge economic cost. In order to support a few rural landowners, food prices for everyone else would have to rise greatly as cheaper foreign imports are kept out by trade barriers, tariffs or subsidies. Encouraging inefficient small scale production over huge modern farms will further raise the costs of production. If there is a market for locally-grown organic food, then some farmers can grow it to sell to the rich at a premium, but we shouldn’t impose massively higher food prices on the urban poor. Keeping out foreign imports would also hurt desperately poor farmers in the developing world who need markets for their crops. Even if this was desirable, we would have to withdraw from international trade/political blocs to implement it, which would hurt other parts of our own economy.