High time for rural policy overhaul

One of the aspects of the National Development Plan (NDP) that will attract interest when it is published shortly will be the policies to promote regional development. The publication in August of the first White Paper on Rural Development would have been expected to provide some important clues as to Government thinking on an important dimension of regional policy. Unfortunately, the document lacks either the flights of creative thinking one might expect from a Green Paper or the specific decisions and resource commitments that one might expect to find in a White Paper.

The challenges facing rural areas are several in number and are clearly set out in the White Paper. They range from the need for increasing numbers of farm families to supplement their farming income with off-farm sources in order to support living standards, to a relative decline in the rural population as migration towards urban centres continues to proceed at pace.

What has passed for rural development policy up to now has really just involved a reclassification of agricultural policies as rural development measures.

The insights from modern development theory and practice in recent years suggest that a thorough assault on rural development can only occur in the context of a national spatial development strategy. By focusing on place, rather than sector, the outline of a strategy capable of confronting the multi-faceted challenges of rural development begins to become clearer.

In the ESRI national investment priorities report, which ought to be an important input into the National Plan, it was argued that a national spatial development strategy should be constructed around the development of a limited number of key urban centres. These centres, it was suggested, would in turn act as development stimuli for their rural hinterlands.

A properly funded investment programme of this nature would be of immense benefit both nationally and to rural communities. This begs the question as to whether monies that are currently expended on agricultural programmes and those that are now to be labelled as "rural development" measures, would not be better used in the pursuit of rural development if they were instead spent on public infrastructure. This is a key policy question that is, perhaps understandably, dodged in the White Paper.

An implication of seeing rural development as a process that is not distinct or separate from a more broadly-based spatial development strategy is that it should not be the responsibility of a single Government department with a traditional sectoral policy focus. The White Paper makes a virtue out of proposing the exact opposite! By doing this it runs the risk of diluting the very sectoral focus that is required for supporting the agricultural sector at its present critical juncture.

The National Development Plan's proposals for spatial development may, and indeed are more likely to succeed in achieving substantially more positive benefits for rural areas than the suite of policy measures that are labelled as "rural development" in the White Paper.

But there is one area where we could reasonably have expected more specifics and this relates to the one programme that is directly under the Department of Agriculture and Food's remit, namely, the LEADER programme. The focus of LEADER (and also the rural area partnership companies) is the local rural area and it has demonstrated a capacity to impact way beyond its relatively narrow budget.

One would have expected the White Paper to have given a firm commitment to the continuation of the spatial development model that LEADER enshrines at the local rural-area level at its current level of total (EU and national exchequer) funding. It is well understood that LEADER funding from the EU will be substantially reduced under the new round of Structural Funds.

The Government has not signalled in the White Paper that it is prepared itself to fund a LEADER-type model of development in those rural areas that will not be part of the new LEADER initiative. An implication which seems to follow from this omission is that the Government will support LEADER only to the extent of matching EU funding. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case with a great deal of public policy programmes that attract EU funding.

Professor Gerry Boyle is Associate Professor in the Economics department NUI Maynooth.