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Thursday, February 17, 2011

USDA seeking fewer definitions of 'rural'

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development program is designed to provide economic development funding to rural communities, but the program's administrators say the defintion of "rural" has become problematic, perhaps because of news stories about previous administrations' spending in places that many if not most people would not consider rural.

The Washington newsletter Agri-Pulse quotes Cheryl Cook, USDA undersecretary for Rural Development: "Relying almost solely on total population as the definition of rural leaves out other obvious characteristics of a rural area compared to a metropolitan area." Cook spoke to the House Subcommittee on Rural Development, Research, Biotechnology and Foreign Operations.

Rural Development administers over 40 different programs and has an annual $20 billion funding authority, but many definitions of "rural," Cook said, "everything from 10,000 in the case of the water and waste disposal program to no rural area requirement in some other cases." She said it is difficult to explain to local community leaders in towns with population between 10,000 and 20,000 "why they would be eligible for a library or a hospital, but not for public water or sewer."

The system "has been challenging for Rural Development staff and exasperating for applicants and lenders," Agri-Pulse reports. "The 2008 Farm Bill made several changes to the many definitions of  'rural' to ensure that funds are not used in and around urban areas, but a panel of county, state and university rural advocates told the subcommittee that the guidance from Congress was too limited to fix all the problems with the current statutory definitions." For instance, the San Joaquin Valley in California is the largest agricultural region in the U.S. by size and production, but many communities in the valley are excluded from Rural Development programs because they have populations of 50,000 or more.

Since over half the rural population lives in counties located in metropolitan areas, "Congress needs to move beyond 'outmoded' definitions of rural as the sole mechanism for targeting scarce resources to rural America," Charles Fluharty, president and CEO of the non-partisan Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, told Agri-Pulse. "If we're going to think about moving from federal dependency to wealth creation, we're going to have to think about an innovation strategy that links rural regions to micropolitan regions and smaller new clusters." (Read more)

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