Rural Development

The concept of rural development embodies a broad range of ideas and practices that defy easy definition. Loosely, rural development refers to the desire and effort to provide a better quality of life for rural people. But what constitutes a better quality of life and how this may be achieved are hotly debated issues. Indeed, the concept of rural development itself begs two important sets of questions. First, what is rural? Second, what is development? Is rural essentially agricultural? If so, what role, if any, do nonfarm activities play in rural economies? Is development an outcome (e.g., more jobs) or a process (e.g., empowerment)? What aspects of human life are most important? Should development efforts be directed toward expanding economic growth or toward providing basic needs and services to improve human welfare? If poverty alleviation is the goal, how best might this be achieved? Finally, who is development for?

The term rural is ambiguous and sometimes is defined as “not urban.” Rural areas usually are understood as sparsely populated areas that are dominated by fields, pastures, and forests and where people spend most of their working time on farms or in other resource extraction industries such as fishing, forestry, and mining. As such, they are distinct from more intensively settled urban and suburban areas and from unsettled wilderness or outback areas. Rural areas are highly diverse, and definitions based solely on population density can be problematic given the vast geographic differences in human settlement patterns around the world. Thus, lifestyle factors such as limited access to public services, schools, utilities, and public transport are also used to delineate rural areas.

Since the 1950s, numerous theories, themes, and policy directives have influenced rural development thinking and practice. One of the most predominant of these, according to Ellis and Biggs, is the theory that small-scale subsistence farmers can form the basis of economic development in rural areas. At the time this idea took root, it marked a major departure from the thinking that had prevailed throughout the 1950s, which viewed industrialization and modernization as the path toward development and large-scale agricultural enterprises (e.g., plantations, ranches, commercial farms) as the most viable agents of economic growth. Small-scale subsistence farmers, according to this early perspective, were viewed as inefficient and stagnant; thus, they were best left to provide resources to the modern agricultural sector, which eventually—and inevitably—would replace them.

After the mid-1960s, however, such thinking began to shift as development economists realized that agriculture plays a key role in overall economic growth and that small farmers are just as capable of effectively using new agricultural technologies, such as high-yielding seed varieties and chemical inputs, as[Page 415] are large-scale farmers. It was observed that rising output in the small-farm sector promotes higher growth in nonfarm economic activities in rural areas than do large farms. Furthermore, a focus on small-farm agriculture had potential to generate greater equity in the distribution of the benefits of development than had been achieved by strategies targeting large-scale agriculture. Development practice during this era continued to promote external technology transfers, mechanization, and expansion of output, but its efforts were directed toward small farmers throughout the developing world.

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