The other side of the urban-rural coin is that by 2050, some 2–3 billion people will remain in the world’s rural villages and on its farms, growing food and fibre for the vast city populations.
To fulfil this heroic task, they will need all the best of all modern technologies – electricity, internet, transport, healthcare, housing, storage facilities, refrigeration – all the things that so much of the rural majority world lacks today.
They will have to adapt their farming to the changes and disasters that climate change is bringing. No matter how big the drought or flood, the effects are always local, hitting individuals, families and villages. All disasters are local. So the solutions must be forms of local development that help individuals and families cope: jobs, income, credit, insurance, healthcare, and transport.
The US Dust Bowl was a time of misery for small farmers, but many could leave and find jobs, could get credit and various forms of help from state or national programmes. The challenge today is to connect national and international aid agencies, UN agencies and the World Bank to the local level, with national governments acting as partners to both sides as intermediaries and honest brokers. All the energy and all the knowledge are at that local level – whether in Latin American shantytowns, remote African farms, or Pacific villages on tiny atolls. If that energy and knowledge can be encouraged by outside resources, people will be able to cope, and maybe even to thrive. Peasant farmers won’t feed the future billions. Neither will unsustainable, carbon-based industrial farming.
