Rural development beyond agriculture

Ukrainian agriculture has been a commercial success and Ukrainian villages have continued to lose people throughout that success. Both facts are well established, and holding them together is the beginning of any sensible rural policy.

Why the two came apart

Modern farming employs very few people per hectare. The value created by a productive field accrues to the operator, the landowner and the export account, and only a small part of it becomes local wages.

So a district can have record output and a shrinking population at the same time, without any contradiction.

What actually decides whether a family stays

A school within a reasonable distance, with teachers. A clinic or at least a paramedic point. A road that is passable in spring. Mobile signal and a working internet connection. And somewhere to buy things.

None of those is agricultural policy, and all of them determine whether the agricultural workforce has anywhere to live.

What decentralisation changed

Amalgamated communities receive a share of personal income tax and decide their own capital spending. That has produced visible results — repaired schools, new kindergartens, resurfaced local roads — in communities that had waited decades for a decision from elsewhere.

It has also exposed capacity differences, because a community with a competent administration outperforms a neighbour with the same budget.

Where the non-farm jobs are

Processing, machinery service, horticulture, forestry, tourism where there is something to visit, and remote work where the connection is good enough to make it possible.

The conclusion

Agriculture pays for a great deal of the country. Whether the countryside benefits from it is a separate decision, and it is made in budgets that have nothing to do with grain.

A village emptying beside productive fields is the inevitable consequence of mechanisation — but the speed of the emptying is set by the school and the clinic rather than by the harvest. I see it travelling from region to region: it is also what I look at when choosing a town for a service point. Without non-farm employment, rural development stays a well-meant phrase.