Not enough focus on solutions to problems in our rural areas

A FORMER Welsh Development Agency officer said rural areas needed to add value to the things that made them different.

Gerallt Llewelyn Jones said his native Anglesey had grown its walking brand with a 125km coast path, which had around 350,000 users per year.

Money from the European Union, he said, had also helped add value to the area’s heritage and helped create new uses for old public buildings which might otherwise be sold.

Mr Jones, who used to run an enterprise agency called Menter Mon, said he felt people in Wales did not focus enough on solutions to problems.

“Are we people lacking confidence?” he said. “I think we are. I don’t think the answers will come from the outside any longer.”

In a wide-ranging talk at a rural affairs conference in Carmarthen, Mr Jones said a flourishing rural economy was vital.

He reckoned the Common Agricultural Policy had narrowed agricultural diversity, manicured the countryside but helped make food more affordable.

But he said people needed to rethink their relationship with food, and what villages were really for.

A village in 1918 provided work as well as food and goods, he said, but this was not the case 100 years later.

The same village in the future, he said, could prosper by growing avocados in a hydroponic poly-tunnels, welcome a second phase of affordable housing, join up with three other villages to set up a nursing home, and fabricate small-scale renewable energy products, among other things.

Mr Jones said automation and our increasingly urban lives were challenges.

“I think capitalism is struggling with automation,” he said.

“Automation is moving ahead at a tremendous pace.

“How do you motivate people?

“It worries me that online communities are more numerous than real ones.”