Rural Crisis and the Origins of Rural Development Programs
In the European Community, the inequalities between rural and urban areas originated with the new system of production and consumption established following the Second World War. This system identified rural areas with agriculture, while industrial production was concentrated in the cities. The rural sector was assigned the dual function of producing food for an eminently urban industrial sector while also supplying it with manpower.
This was the paradigm in which, during the fifties and sixties, large scale processes of emigration of rural populations towards urban environments occurred; processes that decimated rural populations, decompensating their population pyramids and marking a period of decline and crisis in these areas.
During this stage, intensive agricultural mechanization, a result of the productivist bias of the Common Agricultural Policy, also contributed to the expulsion of rural labor.
However, in the mid-eighties, the consequences of the industrial crisis on urban unemployment and a variety of problems generated by the Agrarian Policy (surpluses, budgetary costs, trade conflicts, etc.), forced the European Commission to define a new strategy to replace the approach that had been based on agricultural development and shift towards one that focused on rural development.
Redressing the inequalities that were found in the most disadvantaged rural areas became a priority objective of the Structural Funds and of the Community's regional development policies.
This is the context in which, in the early nineties, the European Commission approved the first call of the Leader Initiative. An initiative of an experimental nature and with a novel approach that aspired to promote the economic diversification of the rural environment with the fundamental objective of retaining the population in these areas.
The Leader Initiative generated enormous expectation within the European rural community; so much so that some member states, such as Spain, supplemented the subsequent demand for the aforementioned initiative with national programs that would allow rural districts that had been excluded from it to apply for a development model similar to that proposed by the Leader Initiative.
Currently, the Leader approach is applied in almost all European rural areas.