AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT[RD107]

CHAPTER ONE

1.1. Introduction

1.1.1..Definition of Concepts of Rural Development

Rural Development in today’s 21^st  century have become the concern  of people from all walks of life including planners, developmentpractitioners, I/NGO experts, media persons,politicians,civil society organizations and private sector organizations,(market and business community) particularly in the developing countries.

1.1.1.1. Development

-Development,after all is growth

-Development,in 21^st century  is a multidimensional  issue which is related  with many other disciplines like social-ciltural,physical,economic,technological,political,educationaland psychological development; the development of  science, genderbalance, protection of human rights, technology and information system, environment and human resources; protecting and balancing environment, industrial development ;improvement of life standard of the people, availability and proper mobilization of physical resources(e.g.petroleum, gas).

-As development is a multidimensional issue, it, asDevkota (2000:26) views, also involves a multifacetedapproach in explaining the process of economic development and social change

-Development as UN (962) states, “is growth plus change. Change in turn is social cultural, economic, qualitative.”

-According to Willy Brandtt (1986:93), development contains not only the material

nb  -Development is a process by which the members of society increase their personal and situational capabilities to mobilize and manage resources to produce sustainable and justly distributed improvement in their quality of life consistent with their aspiration.

-It includes the developmental infrastructures (e.g. human, social, physical and economic infrastructures); the protection and promotion of human rights, social justice, gender equality, decentralized and good governance, institutionalization of democracy: proper improvement in the conditions of health, education, peace law and order. So development in today’s context must be viewed in the light of all factors or in a holistic manner.

-Development may be defned as an ongoing and interventionist process of qualitative, quantitative and/or distributional change leading to some degree of betterment for groups of people (Buller and Wright, 1990).Mobogunje (1989) contends that in order to know if a country has been developing one should find out what has been happening to poverty, unemployment; and inequality. He adds that if the three aspects have been declining, then development has been taking place.

1.1.1.2. Rural areas

-According to The Rural Development Policy of Tanzania (2003),’Rural area can be defined as a geographical place in which primary production  takes place and where the population is found in varying densities.in the context of the policy, rural areas are all under district(rural) councils and areas under the village councils in the peril-urban areas of urban councils.

1.1.1.2.1. Characteristics of rural areas in comparison with urban areas

Table 1: Characteristics of rural areas in comparison with urban

Attribute	Rural Areas	Urban Areas
Food	-Much is produced; much food is eaten but of relatively poor quality -Less balanced diets are eaten	-Little or no food is produced; much food of highquality is consumed -More balanced diets are eaten
Shelter	-Lower quality houses of smaller sizes -Most people own their own houses	-Higher quality houses of larger sizes -Fewer people own their own house
Clothes	-Lower quality, fewer unfashionable/obsolete/démodé clothes	-Higher quality, more fashionable clothes
Infrastructure	-Poorer roads without tarmac -Poor or lack of telecommunication structures -Poor storage facilities,e.g.village go-downs	-Better roads with tarmac -Better telecommunication infrastructures -Better storage facilities,e.g.air conditioned ware houses
Health	-Mostly rely on government health facilities which have inadequate medical supplies and equipment, and shortage of medical staff	-Enjoy both private and government health facilities, with adequate medical supplies and equipment, and adequate medical staff
Education	-More shortage of teachers, buildings and various educational materials. -Fewer female enrolment rate	-Less shortage of teachers, buildings and various educational materials -Higher female enrolment rate
Water supply	-More water used domestically is not Safe(Does not come from improved sources of water) -Water is available at longer distances from home	-More water used domestically is safe(Comes from improved sources of water) -Water is available at shorter distances from home
Employment	-More people are self-employed in agriculture, which is small –scale and paying less	-More people are salaried employees and others are self-employed in non-agricultural activities that are more paying than agricultural activities
Energy	Firewood dominates	-Many varieties of energy are used:electricity,charcoal,kerosene,gas,solar power, firewood
Natural Resources	-Abundant but more exploited by urban dwellers who have permits	-Less natural resources but the urban people have adequate access o the resources
Income	-Generally lower	Generally higher
Population	-Sparse population and larger household sizes -About 80% live in rural areas	-Congested but smaller household sizes. -About 20% live in urban areas
Technology	-Less advanced technologies,e.g.fewer machinery and factories	-More advanced technologies, more machinery and more factories
Markets	-Higher prices of imported foodstuffs -Lower prices of locally produced foodstuffs -High prices of inputs	-Better prices of imported foodstuffs -Affordable prices of locally produced foodstuffs
Culture	-Relatively homogeneous even if the culture is bad	-Various cultural elements are mixed

Advantages of living in rural areas

1. Food is less expensive, fresher and more quantitative in terms of energy. In rural areas where many varieties of foodstuffs are produced, people consume fresh natural foodstuffs. Even if some people buy some foodstuffs, food prices are in most cases, lower than those in urban areas for the same items.

2. Shelter: Low house rent: houses reflect valuable cultural heritage. Housing in rural areas is cheaper than in urban areas. Therefore, although the quality of rural houses is lower against that of urban houses, a greater proportion of rural people have their own houses, unlike in urban areas where a much smaller proportion of people has their own houses.

3. Clothes: Traditional: less expensive and less complicated, clothes are worn

4. Health: Some traditional medicines are effectively used, reducing medical costs

5. Informal education acquired from elders is useful in many cases.

6. Water supply: is less polluted with organic and inorganic elements

7. Employment: Low capital is needed for self-employment. It is relatively easier to live in rural areas without formal employment

8. Energy: It is available free of charge, especially fuel wood

9. Natural resources-Access to natural resources is easier than in urban areas. Therefore, it is easier to work, e.g. Crop production on land, fishing in various water bodies, firewood and charcoal making from nearby forests, and medicinal plants extraction for ethno-medicine.

10. Culture-Cultural elements in rural areas are more easily preserved, unlike in urban areas where the rate of westernization is excessively high. Albeit some of the preserved cultural elements are time-barred, there are some important cultural elements the preservation of which enhances rural development, e.g. mutual trust among rural people

11. Population: Sparse population leads to fresh air and less contamination

12. Due to low pollution, some epidemic and pandemic disease like cholera and HIV/AIDS are less common in rural areas than in urban areas.

13.Social capital,e.g.trust among villagers and helping one another, in rural areas is higher than in urban areas where everyone tends to take his/her own time

14. Safety is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, e.g. theft is low: even if it is there, crude tools are used, unlike in urban areas where fire arms are used.Morever, accidents, let’s say due to vehicles, and are less frequent than in urban areas

15. Since a much greater proportion of rural people are working on laborious activities: unlike urban people, a greater proportion of who are working on less laborious activities: healthy problems like obesity, arthritis and blood pressure are rare in rural areas.

16.Invalids like the crippled, very old, mentally retarded people and children in difficult circumstances are taken care of by either their household members or other villagers:ence begging in streets is minimum, unlike in towns where beggars are commonly seen begging in streets.

1.2. Rural development

The concept of rural development is a matter of prime concern for development experts and practitioners, planners and politicians. it is a comprehensive and multi-dimensional concept and encompasses the development of agriculture and allied activities such as village and cottage industries and crafts, socio-economic infrastructure, community services and above all, the human resource in rural area. It has been viewed differently by different authors;

- Rural development, as Coop (1972) defines, "is a process aimed at improving the well being and self realization of people living outside the urbanized areas through collective efforts." He further contends that the ultimate target of rural development is people and not infrastructure. The objective of rural development should be to widen people's range of choices.

-Rural development, according to Umalale (1974), "is improving living standards of the mass of the low-income population residing in rural areas and making the processes of their development self sustaining. The self-sustaining requires productive agriculture, mass participation and change in administrative set up

-Rural development, for Lassey (1977), has to concentrate on the factors like the preservation of ecological integrity with a view to provide a continuing supply of life supporting resources, efficient and appropriate land use, healthy living conditions, effective social, economic and governmental institutions, improved human welfare in terms of minimal economic social level of existence, physical structure and adopted landscape of pleasing design and comprehensiveness, range of physical, biological and human factors in rural regions."

-Rural development, according M. Todaro, (1977), "has to focus of number of things including improvement in levels of living, employment, education, health and nutrition, housing and variety of social services, decreasing inequality in the distribution of rural incomes, economic opportunities and the capacity of rural sector to sustain and alert the pace of these improvements."

- Rural development, as Pathak (1986) views, includes "the development of small and medium sized towns located in the rural areas in an integrated manner so as to achieve a symbiotic relationship between urban and rural settlement."

- In the words of A.R. Desai (1992), rural development "intends to systematically and scientifically analyze social organizations stretchers and function and development tendencies."

-Rural development, as FAO (1995), forwards highlights on the factors that include social integration, unity, traditions, rules and regulation and the relationship between natural, technical, economical and institutions

-Rural development, according to Sterkenburg, "is a process of change in the rural areas leading to better living condition and greater security of existence of the population."

-Rural development, as defined by World Bank (1975), is conceived as "a strategy designed to improve the socio-economic life of a specific group of people, the rural poor. It involves extending the benefits of development to the poorest among those who seek a livelihood in the rural areas. The group includes small scale farmer, tenants, landless and other disadvantaged groups."

-Rural development, as Robert Chambers defines, "is a strategy to enable a specific group of people, poor rural women and men, to gain for themselves and their children more of what they want and need. It involves helping the poorest among those who seek a livelihood in the rural areas to demand a control more of he benefits of development. The groups include small scale farmers, tenants and landless

-According to Katar Singh, "the term rural development connotes overall development of rural area with a view to improve quality of life of rural people. In this sense.

Rural Development

• Is improvement in welfare of rural residents and in the contribution that the rural resources make to the welfare of the population as a whole (Hodge, 1986, cited by Buller and Wright, 1990). Rural development is an on-going and essentially interventionist process of qualitative, quantitative, and/or distributional change, leading to some degree of betterment for groups of people and individual households.
• Rural Development as a course is concerned with studying development as a rural change pertinent to natural resources, main economic activities (the most important of which is agriculture), social, political, cultural, and other issues affecting well being in rural areas.
• Rural development, as a course, also analyses determinants and consequences of socio- economic change in rural areas.
• Rural development is concerned with the improvement of the living standards of the low-income population living in rural areas on a self-sustaining basis, through transforming the socio-spatial structures of their productive activities.
• It is broader than agricultural development, which is concerned with only one aspect of the rural people’s productive life: agriculture.
• In essence, rural development implies a broad-based re-organisation and mobilisation of the rural masses so as to enhance their capacity to cope effectively with the daily tasks of their lives and with changes resulting from their daily activities.
• Rural development is multi-sectoral. It embraces a variety of different economic and social sectors. These are agriculture and natural resources - crops, livestock, fishing, forestry,the non-farm sector - services to agriculture (including input supply, marketing, transport, finance, agricultural processing), rural manufacturing, mining, and other rural services,rural infrastructure - roads, transport, energy, water,education,health

1.3 Objectives of rural development

Based on the disadvantaged position of rural areas in comparison with urban areas, pertinent to well being, as outlined in Table 1, the major objectives of rural development are the following:

1        Improving living standards of the subsistence population by mobilising and allocating resources so as to reach a desirable balance, over time, between the welfare and productive services available to the subsistence rural sector.

2        Allocating resources to low-income areas and groups of people in rural areas so that they participate more actively in productive and social services activities.

3        Developing appropriate skills and implementing capacity and the presence of institutions at the local, regional and national levels to ensure effective use of existing resources and foster mobilisation of additional financial and human resources for continued development of the subsistence sector.

4        Making the development process in the rural areas self-sustaining in various aspects (including food sufficiency) by involving, rather than simply reaching, rural people, with a view that both men and women participate equitably, if not equally, in various development activities from activities identification, all the way to evaluation, through planning, implementation and monitoring of the activities.

5        Transforming traditional farming so that gradually rural people do away with the hand hoe, but increase the use of modern farm implements, including ox-ploughs and tractors, for more acreage for more production and productivity.

6        Achievement of self-reliance in skilled manpower. One of the reasons for poor performance in various development activities, including agriculture, is shortage of trained manpower. If more of them are trained so that all villages have a good number of them, rural development will be faster.

7        Realisation of mass social services. In rural areas educational, health, and water supply services are poorer than in urban areas. Therefore, one of the objectives of rural development is reducing, if not obliterating, disparities in such social services between rural and urban areas.

8        Attainment of higher income. Since rural areas are poorer than urban areas, even rural incomes are lower than urban incomes. Therefore, one of the objectives of rural development is supporting rural people’s efforts to increase their incomes through both agricultural and non-agricultural activities.

9        Achievement of a more modern life style. Modern life style includes using modern facilities like cellular telephones, the Internet, electricity, good vehicles, and living in better houses. One of the objectives of rural development is to increase the number of villagers using such facilities.

10    Recognition of human rights and responsibilities. One of the objectives of rural development is to make rural people aware of their basic rights as citizens and their responsibilities to the government so that they can claim for the rights and fulfil the responsibilities, respectively. An example of the rights is the right to own land by women. An example of the responsibility is participation in communal activities and payment of various taxes, according to the laws.

11    Conservation of the natural resources base while using the resources in sustainable ways. It is known that rural areas have more natural resources on which even urban people depend. Therefore, conserving the resources contributes to not only rural well being but also to national and international well being.

1.4The origins of rural development

Struggles for rural development to address disparities in well-being between urban and rural people must have started as early as such disparities became clear. However, noteworthy concerns on rural development started in former colonies of developing countries, especially after the Second World War, and the following factors explain the advent of rural development, both as a field of study and as a process of bringing about positive socio-economic changes:

1.      Colonialists established administrative centres that grew into urban areas, having better facilities and services than rural areas. Therefore, concerns arose to supply the rural people also with better facilities and services.

2.      Both during the colonial era and after gaining political independence urban centres acted as magnets for rural-urban migration because of superior facilities and services in urban areas to those of rural areas. The failure of national governments to arrest unplanned urban growth resulted into development of squatter units within boundaries of urban centres and in the peri-urban areas. The squatter areas, which have mixed characteristics of rural and urban areas, also need rural development efforts.

3.      At the global level, for many years, international development agencies and theoreticians neglected rural development; they put more emphasis on industrialisation, with a view that benefits of industrialisation would have trickle down effects on subsistence farmers by some of them being employed in the industries hence getting much wages to obtain their necessities for life. Therefore, in the 1950s and 1960s Modernisation Theories dominated development planning. Unfortunately, the trickle down effects expected were not realised; in lieu of that the industries benefited urban people who had income to consume goods from the industries. In the 1970s it was recognised that rural development represents a very logical way of stimulating overall development (Mabogunje, 1989). The recognition increased after Uma Lele, a World Bank Expert, wrote a book titled “The Design of Rural Development (1975), which stimulated a lot of academic interest.

4.      After formerly colonised countries attained political independence, technical, financial, and material assistance to the poor countries from the former coloniser countries, the Breton Woods institutions and some developed countries did not result into adequate socio-economic progress. There was even escalation of poverty in some places in spite of the international assistance. Therefore, rural development as a study was devised to study phenomena constraining the attainment of adequate development and understand them better, with the intent to design rural development programmes that could leave more long-lasting positive impacts.

5.      Formerly, research on rural development and planning of rural development projects used to have, according to Chambers (1983), the biases outlined below:

                            (a)            Spatial biases, whereby planners used to visit near urban areas, on road sides, and at village centres; hence their plans were tending to favour the places visited;

                           (b)            Project biases, whereby places near development projects and NGOs used to be visited more than other places, hence the visited areas were being given priority in development planning while other areas were being neglected;

                            (c)            People biases, whereby men and the elite used to be visited more than women and common people, respectively, thereby helping the people visited to develop, neglecting other groups of people;

                           (d)            Seasonal biases, whereby visits used to be done in dry or cool/warm seasons, hence not knowing in detail the problems of the rainy season;

                            (e)            Diplomatic biases, including politeness and timidity whereby there is a tendency to hide the realities of poor people to visitors, particularly politicians and diplomats. Statements like “Everything is OK, No problem Sir”, normally accompany this bias. By hiding the real problems, donors would not get insights of the real problems; and

                            (f)            Professional biases, focusing on only some fields of education, e.g. nutrition, hence visiting malnourished people to try to improve nutrition among them.

NOTE:     The rural development discipline reminds us to avoid the above biases when researching and planning rural development interventions.

6.      Tanzania underscored the issue of rural development even before the above international concerns were raised. For example, the Policy Paper titled Socialism and Rural Development (1967) underlined key issues of rural development, including:

                            (a)            Organisation of labour (starting agricultural producer cooperatives, communal production and distribution of goods);

                           (b)            Enabling the state to serve the rural sector and rural commodities (building schools, health facilities, and water supply); and

                            (c)            Providing an opportunity for other aspects of development based on economies of scale (electricity supply, use of agricultural machinery, small industries).

NOTE:           The above contents of the1967 Policy Paper have been addressed for rural development efforts pertinent to social development in rural areas.