The World Urban Forum ended in Baku three days ago with a Call for Action on housing and sustainable urbanism. The agricultural development conference held right after that, on Monday, was in many ways a domestic version of it, a discussion by officials of the other half of the urbanization process highlighted in WUF13 for five days in an international forum. In his address to open the agricultural conference, President Ilham Aliyev made a direct connection between the two: migration from villages to cities, he said, is "a negative trend inherent not only in our country but in all nations," and reversing it requires making rural economic life genuinely competitive. Perhaps a big issue, and with the addition of wars, disrupted supply chains, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has concentrated minds on food security in a way that years of policy papers could not.

Before enumerating, sector by sector, ton by ton, where we are independent and where we are not and how much we lose due to this dependency, the President added, explaining the background to his announcement of the most comprehensive analysis of food security in Azerbaijan that anyone has seen in years, and which forms the basis of a national programme for agricultural development to be adopted and funded within the present calendar year. The timing is not incidental. Azerbaijan's WUF13 discussions on urbanisation just concluded in Baku, and one of the forum's recurring themes was rural-urban migration as a structural drag on food production globally. Aliyev cited it directly: "The second important factor, which was also reflected in the discussions of the World Urban Forum recently held in Baku, is large-scale urbanisation, namely, migration from villages to cities. This is a negative trend inherent not only in our country but in all nations."

This initiative has been partly created to address that challenge, with the aim of making village life economically viable enough to prevent the continued drain that occurs when workers leave their communities and reduce the potential for farming productivity.

Let us look at the 'scorecard' to identify........

© AzerNews