The vulnerabilities of the rural poor to the economic and financial crisis and to climate change and water shortage must be addressed. The success of sustainable rural development depends on, inter alia, developing and implementing comprehensive strategies for dealing with climate change, drought, desertification and natural disaster. Related actions include: a Promoting poverty eradication in rural areas; b Promoting pro-poor planning and budgeting at the national and local levels; c Addressing basic needs and enhancing provision of and access to services as a precursor to improve livelihoods and as an enabling factor of people?
Actions are needed to: a Build social capital and resilience in rural communities. In that context: i Strengthen rural health-care facilities and capacities, train and increase the number of health and nutrition professionals and sustain and expand access to primary health-care systems, including through promoting equitable and improved access to affordable and efficient health-care services, including provision of basic health-care services for the poor in rural areas, in particular in Africa, for effective disease prevention and treatment; ii Create and develop educational programmes for rural communities aimed at disease prevention; iii Eliminate old and new forms of illiteracy in rural communities and ensure provision of primary education and access to secondary and tertiary educational opportunities as well as vocational and entrepreneurship training including proactive and market-related elements to build capacities within rural communities, in particular for youth, young girls, women and indigenous people; iv Encourage rural communities?
In that context: i Encourage the use of land resources in a sustainable manner to prevent land degradation that is caused by unsustainable exploitation of land resources; ii Encourage the use of environmentally friendly practices; iii Promote sustainable natural resources use and management, including ecosystem conservation through community-based programmes; iv Promote safe and environmentally sound waste management practices; f Promote women?
In that context: i Involve women in decision-making in all activities related to rural development; ii Take measures that promote access to and ownership of means of production, including land, capital, entrepreneurship, by women; iii Promote gender equality as well as take measures to achieve equal opportunities for women and men in all aspects of rural development; iv Carry out extensive education, and awareness-raising on the rights of women and the concept of empowerment and gender equality in rural areas.
Welcome to the United Nations. Rural Development. Considering the current agricultural policy see OP , the Bank will favor the establishment and consolidation of credit systems for low-income producers and endeavor to avoid the concentration of institutional credit.
Emphasis will be given to increasing the efficiency of the system and reducing the overall direct and indirect costs. Special attention will be given to the strengthening of financial and technical assistance institutions, either public or non-governmental, that facilitate effective mobilization and channeling of internal and external savings towards investments and other productive uses for small producers.
Whenever global credit operations are involved, as might pertain to Bank activities described in the first three paragraphs following section 3 in "Fields of Activity," the interest rates applicable to the subloans shall be governed by the relevant policy guidelines set forth in document GN Rev.
In the process of promoting the transformation of marginal and subsistence activities and attaining sectoral and regional development objectives, consideration may need to be given to the provision of various forms of income transfer over the time period necessary to attain increased productivity and eventual economic viability. As a necessary complement to productive activities, the Bank will support the development of agricultural marketing systems for low-income farmers. It will support the establishment of collection systems in which various buyers participate as well as arrangements for ensuring compensating minimum prices for certain products.
These arrangements should also be designed to protect low-income farmers from undue price fluctuations without constituting a disincentive to production. The Bank will support technical assistance efforts for small farmer-marketing as an extension of market and price information services. The Bank recognizes that protection of the environment and conservation of the resource base are essential to sustainable rural development.
Thus, the Bank will assign a high priority to measures for protecting the natural resource endowment and the environment within which "campesino" communities are located, by promoting a better understanding and a rational utilization of ecological systems.
Proposed projects should include environmental measures that preserve the quality of air, water and soil and human health in projects that are economically and socially beneficial. The Bank also view environmental improvement and natural resource management projects per se, including research projects as desirable and appropriate components of its rural development strategy.
The Bank will endeavor to ensure that the technology used in rural development projects is appropriate to the regional and local socioeconomic conditions. Efforts will be made to coordinate rural and urban development operations so as to promote the improvement and equipping of rural population centers with productive and social infrastructure for the support of rural activities so that these centers may perform important functions for the location of non-agricultural activities, marketing and processing of rural products, and miscellaneous support services for the production process and for the people living in their areas of influence.
The projects should give due consideration to the nature and dynamics of the socioeconomic processes into which they are introduced and which they are intended to influence. The projects should demonstrate consistency with the characteristics of the existing situation, the problems faced, the objectives pursued and the measures proposed for achieving them.
Efforts will be made to coordinate projects and match them with other development activities in terms of priorities, functional complementarity, inter-agency coordination, and proper spatial integration. Where appropriate, other related activities, whether new investment or rehabilitation projects, that help ensure fuller use of specific sectoral investments, will be encouraged.
Likewise, efforts will be made to ensure that the projects include a proper balance between fast-acting, quick-yielding activities for the rehabilitation and improvement of existing systems and investments for the construction of new works or systems of slower impact over time.
For investments in specific areas, the Bank will encourage the use of an integrated approach even though such investments may be carried out through various complementary projects.
The Bank will endeavor to ensure that multisectoral projects include only those relevant and essential components that can induce subsequent development. Evidence of the compatibility of the components in a given project will be required in order to verify their technical and institutional relevance and to justify the inclusion and sizing of each one.
Past and ongoing experience with integrated projects concerning cost, timing, coordination, and other problems and complexities will be taken into account. Efforts will be made to ensure that the projects include a suitable institutional framework for their execution, avoid duplication, and use the available institutional capacity in each country. Whenever inter-agency coordination becomes essential to the execution of given projects, the Bank will endeavor to ensure that the projects include inter-agency coordination from the preinvestment phase onward.
In developed countries, there is a counter-urbanization process in the proximity of larger cities by movement of people to surrounding rural areas, avoiding noise and air pollution of core cities.
Therefore, the monopoly of farming activities is replaced by manufacturing, industrial, and various services close to larger urban areas where metropolitan regions emerge. However, this situation is in contrast with distant rural communities with primary focus in exploitation of natural resources and farming activities. Similar challenges are facing Indonesia, where rural areas are poorly endowed with infrastructures like roads, sanitation, clean water, and energy [ 13 ]:.
Biogas is a perfect solution for decentralized off-grid electricity situations in rural areas where an abundance of biowaste is available as feedstock; therefore, biogas could be used for cooking, heating, or gas lighting [ 14 ]. Anaerobic digestion is a proper solution to divert organic waste leaking into the natural environment towards an energy source biogas of fertilizer digestate for agricultural land. Animal feed and home composting practices are additional options to handle the organic waste produced at household level supporting organic farming and animal husbandry.
Rural communities must evaluate the exposure of its territory to natural hazards floods, heavy rains, heatwaves, hail occurrence, drought, desertification, wildfire and to take necessary measures to combat such threats.
Poor population and peripheral rural areas are most vulnerable to climate change effects due to their reliance on subsistence agriculture.
Rural population access to mobile phones and the Internet could improve agricultural productivity and better land use management practices based on updated knowledge. Also, digital technologies will help rural councils to reduce bureaucracy and increase transparency in community decisions. Better virtual connectivity to high-speed Internet services will provide new collaborative opportunities for rural entrepreneurs including women empowerment. The EU Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy CAP are two strategic initiatives which can help to reduce the geographical inequalities in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of basic infrastructure, promoting economic activity and agricultural development and improving the qualifications and skills of the inhabitants, particularly in rural areas [ 15 ].
However, the impact of such policies in case of new EU member states needs to be further adjusted with proper funding to boost local and regional economies. The gradual decline of fishery activities across EU rural coastal areas makes it difficult to revitalize these regions, despite new policy incentives such as the Common Fisheries Policy CFP as shown in case of Greece [ 16 ]. The EU policies and financial instruments must accelerate the mitigation gap between western high-income countries and former Soviet countries of the Eastern Bloc where rural regions are regularly left behind.
At regional level, collective forest management supported by small-scale business projects could maintain the network of local produce markets with attractive esthetic values as well as biodiversity conservation [ 17 ]. The role of small- and medium-sized enterprises in rural areas is based on local resource use, contributions to the local public budget, job creation, development of infrastructure, and engagement with community [ 18 ].
Furthermore, small-scale farmers using agroecological practices can produce the food necessary for diversified, nutritious, sustainable diets, while protecting environmental resources from further degradation [ 19 ]. Long-term growth policies should be reoriented to favor small farmers instead of big agribusiness players to maintain food security and social equity in tropical regions [ 4 ]. New urban-rural relations, in terms of organic food production, stimulate nearby farmers to adopt the best management practices and to develop nonfarming activities e.
Rural households that wish to market their products are restricted to local markets, or their production is sold at low prices to intermediaries [ 12 ]. This situation is specific to other Eastern European countries where the dispersion of villages, poor road networks, and the urban concentration of services are impediments in the development of direct linkages between local rural producers and urban customers.
The development of farmer associations could be a solution in increasing access to regional or even national markets, to provide short supply chains and to reduce reliance on food product imports from abroad, particularly in countries with high potential in agricultural productivity like Romania.
Such countries need to raise their rural economies from cheap raw material providers dedicated to exports towards manufactured products and services e. Improvement of water harvesting, cultivating drought-resistant crops, ecological restoration, combined with better local governance, financial instruments, integrated resource management, sound public services, and better urban-rural linkages could help rural communities around the world to become more sustainable.
Remote rural areas of developing countries should rely on renewable energy sources due to poor coverage of electric grids, high costs of fuel transportation, unsuitable roads, and increasing consumption of biomass fuels with related pollution issues [ 21 ].
In poor rural areas of developing countries like Bangladesh, where energy source is based on wood or dried cattle dung, the bioenergy systems e. Rural tourism, agritourism, religious tourism, and ecotourism are alternatives or complementary economic activities that could further stimulate rural entrepreneurship while decreasing rural community dependency on one main economic sector agriculture, forestry, energy, mining, or fishing activities.
Rural communities must respond to wide range of shocks such as natural events, policy changes, economic disturbances, and insecurity , and successfully managing such risks increases the resilience of a rural community [ 24 ].
Sustainable development based on three basic pillars social, economic, and environmental could not be achieved without the proper education of the rural population. The literacy rate is directly proportional to development; thus, full access of rural communities to educational services should be regarded as starting point to achieve ambitious SDGs in developing countries.
Also, rural-urban linkages must be addressed as a pathway to stimulate rural development perspectives. These rural-urban dependences may be positive, negative, or neutral. The positive ones are visible especially in developed countries, the negative ones especially in the less developed countries, but neutral relations are difficult to manage particularly in the proximity of urban areas.
Regional convergence aims to reduce the geographical inequalities in the distribution of wealth between large cities, towns, and rural municipalities which are part of an administrative region or county. Such approach could strength the urban-rural relations in common projects regarding infrastructure, public services, mobility, business opportunities e.
This chapter draws attention to the societal and environmental threats which rural communities around the world are facing. Agenda and SDGs aim to eradicate extreme poverty, famine, open defecation, and other critical issues in developing countries associated with lack of public utilities, mainly in rural areas, and to reduce the huge gaps between countries and regions.
To achieve all range of SGDs across the globe, proper attention must be paid to rural development perspectives such as quality of life improvement, sustainable agriculture, rural resilience, and circular economy and reduced inequalities.
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