The pilot project Regions in Action - Rural areas shaping the future

摘要

How can support for Germany's rural regions be better designed in future? What measures could bring lasting improvements in consumer orientation and ecologically and environmentally sound agriculture? Where is there a lack of incentives to create added value and new jobs in rural areas, and to interconnect urban and rural life? The pilot project launched by the German Federal Ministry for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture in September 2001, Regions in Action - Rural areas shaping the future is to help answer these questions. This project is simultaneously a pilot project under the national strategy for sustainable development, that was presented as the German input to the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. In thecoming years, the pilot project Regions in Action - Rural areas shaping the future is to demonstrate new and feasible paths in rural development and how the population's demands on agriculture can be better satisfied than in the past. Against the backdrop of a reoriented consumer and agricultural policy, interest centres on the growing importance of precautionary consumer protection, the greater orientation of agricultural production to quality, the increase in regional creation of added value andemployment, the conservation of nature, the landscape and biodiversity and the prudent management of finite resources.