[3] Countries and Regions with Disrupted Link between Urban and Rural Development
Introduction
The mission of Wageningen MFC is providing good food for everyone in an urbanizing world. Food security is always one of the major fields of our business. We help our clients solving food security problems, with a co-design approach and implementing the six principles of the MFC concept.
As the current war in Ukraine and the sanctions being imposed on Russia accelerate the rise of agri-food commodity prices and disruption of agri-food logistics and supply, national and regional food security is once again becoming a priority on different countries’ agenda.
Wageningen MFC developed diagnostic instruments to position a country or region on a scale ranging from completely import-dependent to completely self-sufficient (and even exporting substantial surpluses). We categorise four types of countries or regions, based on our project experience and our research on food security:Countries and regions with unavailability of land and/or unsuitability of climate,
Countries and regions with unavailability of land and/or unsuitability of climate,
Countries and regions with massive population pressure,
Countries and regions with a disrupted link between urban and rural development,
Countries and regions with surplus agri-food production.
It is necessary to mention that every region or country has its unique situation, and that the solutions that we are co-designing are tailor-made for improving a specific country or region’s food security to surpass a critical threshold for survival in ‘worst case’ situations, whether it is caused by extreme (or worsening) climate conditions, lack of space, high demographic pressure, general economic under-development, or geo-political tensions.
Here, we elaborate our general view and strategies for each type of country or region to improve food security.
Type 1: Countries and regions with disrupted link between urban and rural development
Until recently, our focus has been on two types of countries: those facing land scarcity and those with potential for surplus production. Countries whose food security is challenged by a misalignment between urban and rural development received less attention, mainly because our roots lie in agropark development. But this is changing. We're increasingly asking: could the solutions we've developed also apply here?
Economic theory paints an ideal picture: rural areas modernise through farm consolidation, technology, and skilled labour, boosting productivity. At the same time, cities industrialise, creating jobs for those no longer needed on farms. The result is a virtuous cycle: rural productivity feeds growing cities, and urban growth fuels demand. When this process works well, countries climb the ladder of development toward strong urban economies and high-tech, productive agriculture. The Netherlands is a prime example, now one of the world’s top food exporters thanks to innovation, cooperation, and smart regional planning such as in the Eindhoven agri-food cluster we discussed in our previous blogpost.
In principle, the strategies we’ve used for land-scarce or surplus-producing countries can also support this type of balanced development. But in reality, urban and rural growth often fall out of sync. In many places like China, India, or Mexico; cities grow rapidly while rural areas lag behind. Young people leave for urban opportunities, and agriculture is left to an ageing population. Modernisation stalls. Cities become dependent on food imports, and rural communities decline.
To break this pattern, we believe technical innovation must be paired with a mindset shift. Agriculture needs a new image: not as dirty, exhausting, and poorly paid, but as clean, high-tech, entrepreneurial, and rewarding. Spades and hoes replaced by smartphones and laptops.
That’s why, beyond infrastructure, we invest in cooperation models and education programmes that help young people see the future of farming—not as a last resort, but as a smart, ambitious career path.
The inside of a modern greenhouse
When the mismatch works in the opposite direction, the remedy is much more difficult. When lagging urban development cannot absorb superfluous rural workers, and a growing and gradually more wealthy urban population doesn’t materialise that can pay for more and better-quality food, the modernisation of the countryside gets stuck. No land is freed to enable the jump in scale that is needed for modernisation. No revenues are generated from which the necessary investments can be made. People in rural areas have no real choice: they can stay where they are sinking ever deeper into poverty because an already overpopulated countryside cannot offer them a livelihood; or they move anyhow, even though, because of lack of regular work, cities cannot offer them a livelihood either. Of course, stimulating industrial and service sector development in urban areas is the fundamental solution to this mis-match, but as long as this doesn’t succeed – or doesn’t go fast enough – there is not much that can be done than trying to improve agricultural productivity, even though basic conditions for such an improvement are not fulfilled. We don’t have ready-made recipes for such a situation yet, though we are trying.
On the academic level, we worked with a few promising Master students who devoted their thesis to the investigation of more fundamental reasons behind the challenges of improving smallholder farmer’s productivity in Ethiopia, and to explore the motivations behind rural-urban migration in Uganda. On the project level, we have elaborated a few Feasibility Studies in the Sub-Saharan region, and also started to cooperate with a number of entrepreneurial initiatives in Africa and Latin America that aim at enhancing productivity and quality of typical smallholders. We will keep you posted of our progress in this field.
