The reason why rural communities even exist is because transport used to be expensive. If you wanted to grow food, you had to live physically close to the food, so a whole lot of small settlements developed throughout the country.
That was before 1900 when industrial machines became available. Nowadays, you can easily farm a huge area while living 300 km away for most of the year.
Well, if the root cause is falling populations in villages as populations move to cities, and assuming that consolidation won’t work because people won’t travel to the next village or move there, you could maybe do mobile bistros. Like, have one van that serves two locations, each on half the days. It means that people can’t go every day, but if it means that a bistro gets more patrons per day, that might work for the bistro, and it might be adequate for the patrons.
Mobile clinics and bookmobiles have been similar ways to successfully provide services in low population areas.
At a certain threshold, if people are just retirees living in a village out of inertia rather than because they need to work in an area (as opposed to e.g. farmers), it might be practical to look into more actively-managing decline, shifting populations of depopulating villages en masse into metro areas, or at least consolidating villages. Always going to have more ability to provide services that way, and if one can do a coordinated move, it might let communities remain more intact.
EDIT: One other point, drawing a parallel with the political situation over here in the US. I think that rural depopulation is, depending upon where one is, potentially something that has national implications. Like, under current US party alignment, the Democratic Party is essentially the party of the urban areas, and the Republican Party the party of the rural areas. Some MAGA concerns in the US deal with the fact that people are not happy about depopulation of rural areas. Some political science author I was reading recently wrote something like “There are two Americas. Things are booming in urban America, but they haven’t been going especially well in rural America for decades.” A lot of how Trump got the support that he wanted was in appealing to unhappy rural voters, saying that he was going to do things like bring back assembly-line labor in factories. When he didn’t do it, voters kind of lost faith this term, and his approval plunged.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/president-trumps-support-declines-sharply-in-rural-america/
The breakdown by issue suggests that the economy lies at the heart of rural Americans’ retreat from the president. Only 24% of white rural voters think that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, while 77% rate it as fair or poor. Just 16% say their family’s financial situation is better than it was two years ago (near the end of the Biden administration), compared to 49% who say they are worse off. Sixty-four percent of white rural voters think that the cost of living is the most important economic problem they face, and only 30% approve of Trump’s handling of this issue. By a margin of 49% to 39%, they have concluded that his policies will hurt the country in the long run.
These sentiments are grounded in real experiences in rural communities. In 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau, farm bankruptcies rose by 46%, a figure to which the president’s policies contributed significantly. His tariffs reduced demand for U.S. agricultural products, especially soybeans, while increasing the cost of key inputs such as farm equipment and fertilizer. His immigration crackdown made it harder for ranchers, farmers, and milk producers to find the workers they needed. The war with Iran sent the price of gasoline and diesel fuel soaring. Last year alone, 15,000 farms closed, and the pace of bankruptcies has accelerated to 70% so far this year.
The rural economy is more than agriculture, of course. Many small rural towns depend on a single small manufacturing plant, and the news has not been good. While President Trump promised that his tariffs would jumpstart a manufacturing revival, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has declined by 77,000 since the beginning of his second term.
These trends are not entirely new, of course. Manufacturing has struggled to reverse the massive employment losses the sector experienced between 2001 and 2010, and the squeeze on agricultural producers has lasted for most of the past 15 years. Since 2011, the prices farmers must pay to produce their crops have increased by 50% while the prices they receive for them have fallen by 4%. But rural Americans expected change for the better under Trump, and they have not experienced it.
Urbanization is a worldwide affair, and so that kind of political experience is, I’d imagine, similar in many places. You figure that politicians can probably appeal to rural residents people unhappy about urbanization and the depopulation of the areas where they live.
I don’t know what the right answer is, because I don’t think that the things that the MAGA crowd wants are generally very reasonable solutions—like, the US is not going to roll back to the 1950s, as the world economic environment has changed. But I do think that it’s worth keeping in mind that rural depopulation does create real problems for people in rural areas, and it might be worth maybe looking at alternate ways of handling rural depopulation than it has been handled in some places, if one doesn’t want to wind up with a bunch of unhappy people and the political effects from that.
Please tell us more about US and Trump-era politics, I’m sure the subscribers to /c/europe can’t wait to hear more about your country.
Also,
it might be practical to look into … shifting populations of depopulating villages en masse into metro areas, or at least consolidating villages.
are you trolling or do you really think that forced relocation of people from rural areas to cities is a serious solution to suggest?
Please tell us more about US and Trump-era politics, I’m sure the subscribers to /c/europe can’t wait to hear more about your country.
He’s drawing a comparison because disaffected rural voters being a major source of the right wing populist shift we’ve seen in Europe as well is a pretty international problem. We’d be stupid not to look at what’s happening in the US and learn some lessons before it’s too late.
Pretty much the exact same story played out here in Hungary; declining rural voters experiencing draining coffers and access to services, no political will to do anything about it, and promises to fix it were a big part of what kept Orbán in power so long. And he was a huge thorn in the side of the EU for years.
We can close our ears and pretend we’re above these things driving politics in the US if we want… meanwhile AfD has had a historic win. I’d say it’s probably in our interest to see how Trump politics took over America to avoid the same fate in Europe considering there are an awful lot of similarities to the conditions that birthed it in an awful lot of European countries.
are you trolling or do you really think that forced relocation of people from rural areas to cities is a serious solution to suggest?
So what’s your solution? Many European countries have tried very generous incentives to pull people back to the declining villages, Hungary would give huge loans at zero interest that could be discharged entirely, Italy has tried their own incentive programs, nothing is working. If the solution were simple we’d have done it already.
I don’t think forcibly moving people is right, obviously, but trying to reverse the incentives to get people out of villages where it’s impossible to practically provide services rather than continue the failed attempt to repopulate them doesn’t seem crazy to me.
The underlying issue with rural communities is they are being hit harder by poorly regulated trade and cheap long distance transportation. This combined with more than a century of under-investment in the infrastructure has led to a steady decline in the economies of rural regions.
The extreme wealth of the industrialized nations has been built up by taking advantage lower value of human life and labor in other regions.
For example French farm laborers are treated more like human beings with the right to live. They have reasonable pay and working hours. French farms are directly competing with farms in Africa and South America. These areas tend to treat farm laborers more like serfs. They pay very little and are treated as easily replaceable. So French farmers profits have fallen steadily over the decades. This removes money from rural communities and the community declines as well.
Politically the largest issue is that the money is leaving much faster than the people. So people sink into poverty over time but remain where they are. These people are under-educated, isolated, and suffering = fertile ground for bad actors to exploit.
The solution is too painful for the industrialized nations to even consider. It would disrupt over a century of profits and crash the global economy. Import requirements: require that the labor in the production country be treated as actual human beings like in the industrial nation.
That’s definitely a part of it. When everyone was crapping all over tariffs in general after the Trump tariff debacle, I was arguing from the left that while Trump’s trade war tariffs obviously sucked, the idea of tariffs on countries with lower labor conditions in order to make domestic workers with better pay and labor protections competitive is actually sound. If you don’t provide any penalty for undercutting labor rights and practices you’ll just get outcompeted in a market economy. And it also disincentivizes export countries from undercutting their labor, hopefully improving labor rights there.
Not only do we have undercutting of labor, but there’s also the exporting of industries with lots of negative externalities; we crow about reducing mining, or drilling, or lumber production, but we just buy those things from other countries anyway. A lot of those industries tend to be rural by nature as well.
That said, that kind of “race to the bottom” with labor conditions has hit urbanites pretty hard, too; lots of cities that were founded on heavy industry like car or steel production, manufacturing in general… unfettered globalization has hit all lower and middle classes hard.
I think though with rural communities, a big part of it is we’ve just become so efficient and reduced labor needs so much, especially in industries like farming, that small communities which are much more vulnerable to big population shifts in the first place, just die out. When you go from needing dozens of farmhands per farm, more during harvest, to only a few and a combine… small communities just can’t absorb that kind of population shift the way a city that’s more diversified can.
So for some of these villages, I just don’t think there’s any coming back even if we did have strong labor laws and some protectionism for that domestic labor (which we absolutely should). You’d have to purposefully go back to less efficient farming methods, which has some pretty big implications for a population size that’s since far outgrown that kind of output. Those villages just aren’t coming back in nearly any conceivable circumstance, I think, and there should probably be incentives to move people out of them and let them die out.
Frankly, for those small communities that don’t have any prospects for growth, I think some thought should be put into actually helping them along in closing down, moving residents out to more living communities, and rewilding the land they once sat on.
After the country-wide quarantine was lifted here in France, I hoped for a moment that we would capitalize on the remote-work experience to push as much employment as possible out of the cities and suburbs and into rural communities, but that never materialized.
I don’t think it’s necessary to empty rural villages, but there definitely needs to be a concerted effort to revitalize these parts instead of letting what amount to market forces drain them of their capacity to sustain life and communities.
The currently-employed “more efficient” farming methods are also only possible by continuing to centralize more and more land under single owners and by heavy use of fertilizers and mono-culture; there’s no telling how long they will remain effective and in the meanwhile we’re starting to recreate the landed gentry/ serfs class divide…
