A Reflection: Mountain Agriculture as an opportunity for Youth.

By Sylwester Ujazdowski

Agriculture is a branch of a global economy that is one of the most important (or maybe even the most) for human beings in the sense that it provides the products for basic needs for humans to survive. But nowadays in a global system the production of food is centralised, improved (mechanised, even digitized) to that extent that requires less and less human’s hands to work. In this situation new generations of people, especially young ones, are cut off from agricultural activity, because the jobs are more attractive in the cities. This situation leads us to the complex problem of depopulation of rural areas.

Another reason that makes this problem even more deeper is the inequality of land property. While some people own a huge part of the land, others have none and without perspective to ever own it. However there are still quite a few young people that live in the rural areas in the EU (30%) even if the density is very low compared to the cities. Especially the young people are much less than the seniors, which means that those differences will have a tendency to increase.

Why is it like this? Why Young people prefer to live in cities, rather than in rural areas? For sure there are many reasons, but one of them is surely a perspective of job and opportunity for career, but also access to the public institutions, health care service, education, etc.

Therefore the reason why young people choose the big cities is another cause, which makes it so called “closed circle”. No jobs equals no perspective and no money. No money means no properties and no investments; this leads to the searching of perspective by young people in the bigger cities, which leads to the depopulation, and if community is demographically decreasing, there is also centralization of public service. When there is no public service, life in the rural areas becomes hursh. No people, no money, no investment… Whatever is the first cause (causa prima) the final effect is the same – depopulation.

But, we can change it. We can reverse this tendency by promoting life in rural areas amongst Young people. The EU has this political and economical power in accurate cooperation with national and regional governments to attract them to stay, or to come and stay, by distributing the money to the special programs, and projects. One of the good examples of such good practice is the Agrogen project in which we, polish people, had a chance to be part of.

In our 11 days trip across Cantabria, Spain, together with an international team from Greece, Italy and Bulgaria, we have seen a lot of good practices on how to use Mountain agriculture to make living in the rural areas more attractive. For sure we also have shared our own examples and ideas on how to take advantage of living in the countryside, but this specific visit to the Cantabria region gave us a hope for systematic and on a wide scale organised international cooperation to support Young people in their way to start a business or activity connected with the agriculture.

In Poland for example, but not only, it is still a problem for Young generation for not having a proper capital to start the realisation of their plans and ideas. It should be a long term process to support them. One thing is to see and experience the good practice, and another is to start making them happen. We have learned during this trip that the EU has a wide-scaled program to support them in this.

Mountain agriculture has a chance to attract Young people in two magnetic fields. Food production, and the tourism industry. But the regions across Europe differ by geographical and environmental sense. Some rural areas may be not attractive enough for tourists, and some may not be not enough fertile for farming. However, sharing the good practices from Mountain agriculture that we have encountered during the trip to Cantabria led us to the new perspective of how to make our small homelands more attractive, efficient and comfortable to live, just simply using a indigenous, native, and domestic environment. Not to complain about what we do not have but search for the things that we already have and take them as an advantage. The idea of what You can do in Mountains may be just good start to convince the Young people to invest their life or savings (if they have some) to start their business, enterprise, or other activity, but after many discusion during this trip we have found out that what is most needed to keep them going in this plans is a strong integration on both levels: local one and international one. Because for living in an area with limited access to public service it is important to support one another. Mutual help, and trust in the local community is a basic way to make life easier in the countryside. On the international level things are pretty the same. Mutual support, sharing experience and ideas, exchange of good practices, and a sense of community without a sense of isolation may appear to be crucial in this process.   

Sylwester Ujazdowski is an outdoor learning trainer and works with people with disabilities in rural areas. He has been the leader of the group of Polish participants that the “CIE Center for Innovative Education” has sent to our sessions in Cantabria.