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Contributions from
the Column
Books and Media
United Nations handbook
Wars in Africa – lots more work for the UN
Poverty reduction – a cross-sectoral task
12/2003 |
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[ Good and unconventional questioning ]
What future for life in rural areas?
This book documents a three-day conference at EXPO 2000 in Hanover, a "global dialogue" organised by the Bonn Centre for Development Research (ZEF) in cooperation with InWEnt forerunner DSE and other German and international partners to promote an exchange of views and ideas between researchers and politicians, representatives of business and NGOs, and practitioners of development cooperation. And the message is clear: life in rural areas has a future only where political and institutional conditions help make the innovative capacity of rural communities productive. Democratisation and participation are imperative – achieved, for example, through political decentralisation, which can promote more effective government and empower the rural population.
One of the main issues addressed in the book is the impact of human activity on natural resources and the possibilities of achieving sustainable use of such resources. What the authors in this chapter all share is the view that the importance of natural resources in rural areas is generally undervalued, which in many places leads to over-use. Incentives and institutions need to be created to help curb resource depletion. But it is not enough just to modify institutional conditions. Communities need to be helped to combine new and existing forms of use and technologies so that sustainable and efficient use of natural resources is ensured.
So promoting innovations that stimulate both sustainable production and high productivity in agriculture is considered an important task for the future. At the same time, fundamental opposition to modern technologies is deemed every bit as harmful as disregard for traditional and indigenous knowledge. That is the tenor of the papers in chapter 3, where it is recommended that the debate about new technologies, especially information and biotechnologies, should focus more on the possibilities of combining modern and traditional technologies and on the issues relating to new technologies' safety and acceptance.
The last chapter of the book looks at what is needed to create viable relations for the future between town and country. Urban and rural development should not be viewed in isolation, as two separate phenomena, because rural regions could be economically, politically and culturally marginalised as a result. All the authors here therefore attach great importance to regional planning.
So the village and rural areas needs to be assigned greater developmental importance as a place to live and work. That is the demand at the core of the writings collated here. On the whole, the book makes for interesting reading, presenting papers which cover the broad span of experiences in rural development and at the same time ask many good and unconventional questions which cast that experience in a new light and steer proposals in a new direction.
But the book also has its shortcomings. For one thing, the chapter on agriculture devotes too much space to biotechnologies and pays too little attention to the criticisms levelled against them. And in the chapter on promotive policy, the reader looks in vain for a critical analysis of the impact of unfair agricultural trade and the occasionally conflicting thrusts of international development cooperation.
Carmen Hess, Klaus Klennert
Detlef Virchow,
Joachim von Braun (ed.):
Villages in the Future. Crops, Jobs and Livelihood.
Berlin, Springer 2001,
410 pp. (with CD-ROM),
Euro 106.95, ISBN 3-540-42467-9
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