Highlighting Rural Development
Highlighting Rural Development. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Rural America has taken a beating in the last several years and the government is now recognizing that something needs to be done. So how are things in rural America. Rural Development Under Secretary Dallas Tonsager believes things are looking up.
TONSAGER: I think agriculture is doing very well mostly. You always have a few gaps along the way but by and large prices are pretty good, exports are pretty good. We’ve built some industries that do processing like biofuels that helps on income. The economic development parts, the parts related to small communities - I think there’s a bit more struggle there especially in some areas where you just have low populations and aging populations. So I think the more things we can build that makes stuff out of what we grow the better off rural is going to be.
Tonsager talks about what it will take for rural areas to feel really comfortable again.
TONSAGER: You know obviously an overall economic turnaround is important and I think we’re making some progress, jobless rates are coming down a bit. But I truly believe in the long term we have to take a very strong approach to processing, manufacturing, building things. And to do that, a lesson we learned back in the 1980’s and 90’s in my part of the country was farmers need to come together with community people and invest in themselves. And that’s what we did with biofuel.
The key word according to Tonsager is “local.”
TONSAGER: And I think that local investment, that local ownership, that economic building process really needs to happen to make us get to a point where we feel comfortable where we’re creating jobs locally, financing jobs locally, keeping some of the wealth locally, creating markets for what we grow - I think that’s a huge factor.
He talks about what the Obama administration is doing in their 4th year to help.
TONSAGER: We’re taking some large steps and some of them are difficult right now. We know the government has to shrink and we have shrunk as an agency by about 10% in the last 4 months. We did about $30-billion dollars in business last year - most of that financing. I think the report speaks for itself. About 150-thousand homes financed, the broadband system we’re working on building which has about 300 projects that are being developed right now to bring broadband to lots of rural communities. Biofuels is just right at the head of the pack on things to do because it does bring economic opportunity to rural communities.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
