Rural community policies needed

IT will be more important than ever in the years ahead to have policies which meet the needs of rural areas as a whole, according to European Union Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel.

Speaking in Kaunas, Lithuania, she said farms and farmers play a pivotal role in many rural communities.

“We must continue to support farmers in their efforts to modernise their holdings. But there are other needs, too. We must ensure that the rural economies and communities in which farming is embedded remain viable.

“And we must make the right funding available to those farmers and other land managers who want to go beyond minimum environmental require-ments and take special care of the landscape and nature, for the good of the public and our planet,” she said.

Ms Fischer Boel said that from this point of view, the rural policy which the EU has in place is a good one.

However, finding money to support rural develop-ment is not about encoura-ging ‘welfare dependency’.

“The people of the countryside are not victims. They are tough and hard-working, and they have a valuable contribution to make.

“But there are limits to what they can do if local infrastructure and services are inadequate — if, for example, they don’t have broadband internet access, or if there is no kinder-garten for their children.