Rural Land Issues

• Rural areas are characterized by having small populations and being located far from major cities.rural landscape image by Tom Curtis from Fotolia.com
  
  While urban or metropolitan areas are home to office buildings and factories and are centers for business and finance, rural areas are home to farms and are agricultural hubs. For this reason, rural lands are incredibly precious resources, as our wheat, corn, potatoes and other sustenance crops depend on their success. In addition, rural lands provide scenic views and are habitats to a wide array of wild life. Unfortunately, there are several issues that could potentially affect the integrity of rural land.
  
  

Poverty

• According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), of the 1.4 billion poverty-stricken people in the world---living on less than $1.25 per day---75 percent live in rural areas. One of the reasons poverty levels are so high in these areas is because the economic success of the land's inhabitants is linked to the success of the local agriculture. So if there is a drought, flood or other disaster that inhibits crop production in a rural area, people are often left without sources of income for that particular season or year.
  
  

Ownership

• Local control over rural lands is vital to the economic success of rural communities. However, as IFAD notes, competition for rural lands is extremely fierce, and ownership issues will continue to increase as the world's population rises. Poverty in rural areas can often lead to foreclosures on land and property, which means that locals can lose control over economic production and corporations can take over. According to IFAD, in addition to providing social stability, strong ownership---or tenure---can allow people in rural areas to diversify their modes of income by renting out parts of their properties to other farmers and borrowing against their properties to fund other projects.
  
  

Development

• When people lose ownership rights over rural lands, those lands may become subject to urban sprawl, or the development of non-agricultural, unnatural-looking infrastructure. As the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) notes, when development occurs on rural lands, it eliminates the agriculture usefulness of those lands in a process that is "essentially irreversible." This means that once green, rustic environments would be forever transformed into concrete-laden, urban zones.
  
  

Pollution

• According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), agricultural activities such as irrigating, fertilizing, harvesting and grazing, can all contribute to the pollution of rural lands. One of the main issues, which concerns people outside of rural areas in addition to those living in them, is non-point source pollution. This type of pollution occurs when fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals run into streams or seep into groundwater. In addition to poisoning organisms and causing other ecological damage, these chemicals can potentially reach and contaminate public water supplies.