Mr. Sándor Fazekas, Minister of Rural Development has launched for public debate a National Rural Strategy for the next ten years at the Farmers’ Forum in Karcag, Nagykunság.
Public Announcement.

The goal of the strategy is to promote social and economic improvement for all affected in the countryside.

Establishing and executing a new strategy of Agriculture, the Ministry is striving to promote a complete renewal of rural Hungary. In order to achieve this, it defines the necessary directives in four comprehensive areas: agriculture, rural development, food production and environmental protection.

Entering the third millennium of civilization, our nation can feel secure only if it protects consciously its countryside and rural population with good quality and secure food supply and sustainable management of our natural resources. The protection of our water supply, soil, flora and fauna, and the environment are strategic tasks of great importance related to our national security.

Hungary, throughout the centuries has been able to renew itself by relying on the strength of village communities and the roots of the countryside. The issues of agriculture, the countryside and environment are not problems concerning only villages. Each Hungarian is affected by the success and failure of the countryside. Despite the fact that our natural resources – like fertile soil, our thermal, medicinal and drinking water supplies, our countryside and our food products are versatile and excellent, we still cannot make the most of them.

The significant decay of the conditions of country life and the further deterioration of Agriculture requires a quick and fundamentally different approach to economic and social policies in order to stop “the Latin Americanization of Hungary”. The National Rural Strategy – which has not existed so far - is serving this goal and defines clear principles and action programs in the longer run in order to revive the countryside and the communities of farmers.

The central and comprehensive goals of the strategy are:

- the preservation and increase of rural workplaces

- the preservation of the rural population and restoring demographic balance

- the guarantee of food production and ensuring food supply, to eliminate poverty in the country

- increasing the vitality of agriculture and food production, improving our market position, restoring the appropriate balance between crop production and animal husbandry.

- the protection of drinking water supplies, preservation of water sources, soil natural flora and fauna and the countryside, and increasing environment protection

- energy supply based on local resources and systems, security of energy, decreasing of energy dependency

- improving the quality of rural life and diversification of the rural economy

- restoring the close connection between the city and its environs

- The national rural strategy is introducing concrete directives to achieve these comprehensive goals and introduces a national program.

It is our intention to turn Hungary into such a country where European diversity, quality of agriculture, good management of the countryside and the environment is becoming standard. Hungary will produce valuable, healthy, secure food without GMO intervention and will simultaneously protect the soil, the drinking water supplies, the flora and fauna, the countryside and local communities with their backgrounds. At the same time Hungary will provide work and livelihood for as many people as possible.

We wish to restore the reputation and the attraction of country life so that people in the countryside can be proud again to live where they do and enjoy it. The Ministry’s endeavor is to have a widespread social debate that should precede the strategy and the approval of its fundamental legal framework.

We ask everybody to participate in the debate to create together our rural strategy that should serve our national interest and become the “constitution of rural Hungary”.

(Ministry of Rural Development, Press Office)