La opinión de los agricultores gallegos sobre sus condiciones de vida, el desarrollo rural en Galicia

Abstract

The European Conference on Rural Development, held in Salzburg in 2003, recognised the diversity of Europe’s rural areas as regards their natural landscapes, their agricultural production systems, and their capacity to retain and attract population. Our study focuses on this aspect and aims to be helfpul in avoiding the depreciation of the standard of life and the well-being of the people who live in rural areas. Therefore, it becomes necessary to evaluate the needs of rural population and to assess rural well-being, which must be understood as a complex term that is difficult to assess. Moreover, the European Union remarks that rural development is based on improving the standard of live by intervening in environmental quality, level of income, and living and working conditions. The standard of life can be evaluated by creating a computational conceptual framework in which the different variables considered in the analysis are reflected jointly by developing a battery of multivariate indicators.

In this approach to the knowledge of the standard of life, a spatial differentiation was conducted in 22 regions in Galicia based on the concept of rural well-being and on the opinion of farmers.