As the world becomes more urban, rural area has to transform to expand the efficient and sustainable supply of a wide range of goods and services.
What is clear today is that rural, the rural transformation, and rural development are no longer synonymous with agriculture, agricultural modernisation, or agricultural development.
The distinction becomes greater as countries develop. The 2008 World Development Report, titled Agriculture for Development (World Bank 2007), placed developing countries in three categories based on the share of agriculture in the national economy and of rural poverty in total poverty: “agriculture-based,” “transforming,” and “urbanised.”
Extensive environmental changes are affecting agriculture in many ways which mean that farmers must adapt to changing rainfall patterns and fluctuations in temperature that would cause yields reduced by more than 20% in many areas, with poor countries and poor farmers facing particularly severe outcomes
Today, over 900 million people still suffer from hunger. Poor populations worldwide, especially in rural areas, are among those most vulnerable to the food, climate, financial, economic, social and energy crises and threats the world faces today.
It is important to build the capacity of rural people to drive change in key areas of sustainable development such as natural resource management and agricultural productivity.
The rural transformation is in essence, a process by which the sharp economic, social, and cultural differences between rural and urban gradually blur and bleed into each other along a continual rise.
