Food Security and Rural Development

Agriculture and rural development are central concerns of development policy: most poor and hungry people in the world live in the countryside. The countryside continues to be neglected and plundered and there is inadequate access to educational and health facilities. Rural power structures often deny the lower classes their rights and small farmers are pushed to the periphery of society. The low-income and resource poor people and rural areas are increasingly being excluded from development.

EED does not fund specific projects of agricultural production in a narrow sense. The programmes we support are integrated rural development projects where food production is at best one part of a more comprehensive programme. The focus is on combating poverty and hunger in the countryside. This includes improving production techniques, basic health systems, basic education, gender equality, awareness raising and forms of self organisation.

Hunger is more than just a question of production. The clearest sign of the socio-economic crisis of rural areas is the fact that 70 per cent of the hungry people of the world live in the countryside. Those people who produce the food for other people have the least to eat themselves. The rural poor are extremely vulnerable to arbitrariness, deceptive practices, changes in policy, the failure of markets, unrest, environmental changes, international competition, trade policy and natural phenomena.

EED wants to strengthen people in the countryside and their fight for survival. One way in which this can be done is by means of specific development measures at the local level. We don’t want to impose modernisation from outside on them. The people affected have to take their liberation from poverty and hunger into their own hands. They are the experts of their own fight for survival. The involvement of those affected by raising their awareness is central to all projects. The agricultural technology that our partners promote does not reach out for any elaborate mechanisation, sophisticated laboratories or hierarchal institutions. Our approach looks for sensitive forms of taking rural society’s own – sometimes – traditional methods and institutions a bit further.

Our aim is a commitment to organic farming, traditional seed care, and biodiversity and against the destructive tendencies associated with agricultural genetic engineering and mono-cropping.
Central to all what we do is the active participation of the poor.
Financing our foreign partners’ integrated programmes in the sphere of rural development directly improved living conditions there.

At the same time, this approach requires political support at national and international level. Many impoverishment processes have their origins in international economic relations. The rural poor have to raise their voice to advocate for their survival issues. We therefore also support their networks and campaigns. At international level we stand up to ensure that the policies of our government, the EU and international organisations are monitored well, in order to interfere when we find out that they harm the rural poor. The external relations of our societies should also defend the policy space so that the poor societies can determine their own development and rural affairs.

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Food Security and Rural Development