Funding rural development in the Third World will be insufficient to significantly improve the financial status of rural families or preserve wildlife biodiversity, according to an expert at UC Davis.

Truman Young, a UC Davis professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and the Center for Population Biology, expresses those concerns in an article in a recent issue of the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy.

International projects have worked for years to raise incomes for rural farm families, recently as part of integrated strategies that include biodiversity conservation. But even at their most efficient, Young says, these lands cannot sustain their current populations except at poverty levels.

Rather, efforts to decrease poverty and restore natural habitats should recognize that human populations have been moving from rural to urban areas on a massive scale, and focus on giving immigrants the skills to thrive in cities.

Young focuses on Brazil's Amazon Basin and Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve as examples of the limits of rural development. Both these areas are rich in natural biodiversity and generally poor in the nutrients or rainfall needed to sustain profitable agricultural communities. Using development/conservation policies to help increase agricultural production or resource extraction such as timber or rubber may substantially raise family incomes in the short term, but will never do so sufficiently to lift them fully out of poverty, Young said.

"We need to recognize that for many living in rural areas, there is a strong attraction, especially in the younger generation, to the cities," he said. "This trend has been growing steadily, and the rural populations of many tropical countries are already declining. Given this phenomenon, the best long-term strategy may be to assist the migrant rural communities by giving them education to assist in this migration, rather than enticing them to stay on unprofitable lands."

In addition, land left abandoned as people migrate to the cities can be made available for natural biodiversity. His paper points out cases of farmlands in the Amazon that were transformed into secondary rainforest after they had been abandoned.

He is quick to point out that the movement to the cities is not an economic panacea; many urban centers are poor, unhealthy and dangerous places. Nor is he advocating the forcible removal of populations from their rural homes as a way to restore biodiversity. Instead, he urges conservationists to recognize urban migration as an inevitable long-term human current, and to refocus their efforts on making the transition as smooth and environmentally friendly as possible.