The breakout session on institutions and policies needed for rural development identified rural areas as the “weakest link” in the supply chain of agricultural goods. The organizational structures in particular needed to be improved, chair John Wilkinson from CPDA/DDAS/UFRRJ reported back to the plenary.
The panel started from a bottom-up approach and defined six broad fields of action: food security and rural development, the relationship between the state, civil society and the private sector, the links between national and international agendas, conditions for sustainable production, the coherence between rural development policies and macro-economic policies and the need to adapt policies to global tendencies.
Wilkinson remarked that the farmer had to be considered the key component in the struggle for food security, but that a variety of forms of employment in the non-farm sector should also be considered, for example in transportation and trade. He also warned that involving civil society should not be reduced to involving NGOs but also universities, Parliamentarians, media enterprises, SMEs and most importantly societal actors at the local level. He held that the local level was the weakest link, because of a lack of horizontal cooperation between farmers and of the institutions necessary to promote it.
Participants agreed that state-driven policies had the most fundamental impact on rural development and should therefore be absolutely coherent. Conflicting policies from different ministries, for example, could derail even the most effective programmes, said Wilkinson (to read more details, click here). Different ministries should therefore cooperate in formulating and implementing their policies, the working group recommended.
Finally, state actors should also crucially respect global tendencies as a context for policy formulation, Wilkinson reported. The breakout session specified five aspects that should be particularly taken into consideration in policy-making, namely population growth, pressure on raw materials, population movements, developments in commodity markets, and climate change.
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