New Zealand's Approach to Rural Development
For some years there has been growing official recognition that people living in the more geographically remote and isolated areas have greater difficulty retaining and maintaining services, or participating in cultural or social activity, compared to people living close to large centres of population. This concern, when aired by both government and the farming sector, was initially linked to concern about the ability of rural centres to service the agricultural sector. The viability of rural communities was seen as dependent on their ability to provide commercial services.
While the concern about access to services by rural communities remains, community viability is no longer regarded as dependent on either the community's ability to service agriculture or on its holding a full range of services (although it is, of course, in the agriculture industries' interests to have easy access to strong servicing bases). On the other hand, there is growing awareness that a community can be drawn out of economic decline by judicious investment in enterprises based on local resources. It is this view which is steering the current approach to rural development in New Zealand.
The New Zealand Government no longer supplies the kind of assistance which subsidised
the farming sector in the past4, and has centralised many
government services in the larger urban centres. Rural communities whose economy was
previously backed by the artificial supports of subsidies, or by providing government
services which have now been shifted to urban centres, are now widening their vision and
are looking at ways of using local resources to maintain their viability. Communities have
generally not tended to undertake this process in the past because they lacked
information, did not have knowledge of workable options and alternatives and often did not
have the management skills to undertake such action. Emphasis in New Zealand is on
enabling communities to obtain this information and skill base so that they are in a
position to resolve their problems themselves through collective action, sometimes in
partnership with the Government.
4 Not only were such programmes found to be fiscally unsustainable they are inequitable in terms of the benefits they provide to different communities and different sections within communities (Sandrey and Reynolds, 1990).
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Contact for Enquiries
Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
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