Introduction to Rural Development

Perhaps because I grew up on a farm in Ohio, I have long been interested in rural development. Although I first became a migrant at the age of 17 when I left the farm to continue my studies in a city college, I was not aware of the relation between rural development and migration until many years later when I began studying patterns of urban and rural poverty.

This research has grown out of my continuing investigation of the ways that migration has been seen as both a response to chronic conditions of rural poverty and a factor potentially exacerbating urban poverty conditions. If governments wanted to deal with urban poverty, they would want to restrict urban in-migration, yet if they reduced urban in-migration, this would remove one of the important means available to persons seeking to raise themselves out of rural impoverishment.

This would clearly be a no-win situation for the rural poor; the only way to deal fairly with both urban and rural poverty would be to foster socio-economic development of rural areas. Thus, I became interested in studying the patterns of rural development which actually have had an effect on the migration decisions of rural families.