- What is the rural population?
- Characteristics of the rural population
- Differences between rural and urban population
- Rural population of Mexico
We explain what a rural population is and what its characteristics are. In addition, its differences with the urban population.
What is the rural population?
When we talk about the population rural we refer to those sectors of a country or a region that make life outside the cities, in geographic sectors of low population density and whose usual economic activities tend to agriculture. These rural regions tend to be much larger than urban ones, and depending on the degree of development of the country, they can be more or less poor than their urban counterparts.
The rural population is as old as human civilization itself. In fact, the first permanent settlements of the humanity (that is, the abandonment of nomadism) arose from the hand of the agricultural activity and domestication, since it was much more productive to stay in one place and exploit the I usually, than wandering waiting for the food.
Currently, in the post-industrial world, rural populations are the majority in less developed and industrialized countries, that is, in those with the economies more dependent. On the other hand, in the so-called “First World” countries, the predominance of the urban population, whose food comes from external regions, is notorious. Similarly, from a global perspective, urban life is much more abundant than rural life.
Characteristics of the rural population
The rural population can vary significantly from one region to another or from one country to another, but it usually always has some more or less similar characteristics. Historically, rural people tend to live in families more numerous, given that the rate of birth rate is higher than in cities, and therefore tend to be very young populations, economically oriented towards agricultural work or towards agriculture. cattle raising. Your contact with the nature it is constant, and its day is determined by the biological clock.
However, in recent times, the rural population had to face the lack of exploitable land to guarantee its growth and the decline cost effectiveness of its products against technologies or products made from the society industrial, eminently urban. Thus, there was a worldwide exodus from rural areas to cities, accelerating the process of urbanization and leaving the field either in the hands of a few families of landowners, large Business of agriculture, or failing that, of various types of agricultural associations that, in some cases, barely exceed the subsistence economy.
In the Third World countries, in addition, the agricultural population is usually much poorer than the urban population, having to face peripheral and marginal living conditions, with very low economic income and a relative isolation from the services of the agricultural sector. Condition.
Differences between rural and urban population
The rural and urban populations are distinguished in many aspects, the most important of which is related to the food production. Cities are not good or great food producers, for which they require agricultural inputs from the countryside. In this sense, cities are highly dependent on the rural population, but at the same time the products manufactured in urban factories have an added value that, despite depending on the raw material from the field, they make them much more expensive.
On the other hand, cities consume much more energy than agriculture, and they are the place where political power resides and not the countryside, and the state bodies are established: ministries, embassies, centers of power, etc. Despite this, the urban population tends to live more hectic, less healthy lives, exposed to much higher levels of pollution and stress, so it's no wonder they live less. Even so, the distribution of work in urban society is much more diverse than in rural society, centered on the primary sector. The secondary, tertiary and Quaternary are generally linked to the industrial population of the city.
Rural population of Mexico
As it is in many other countries of the Latin America, the Mexican population has an eminently agricultural history, since the colonial society established by the Spanish Crown in the 16th century was of an extractive nature: cultivating and exploiting the resources of the American soil to send its resources to the European metropolis. This development model was maintained despite independence, to the point that its conflicts nineteenth-century and other more contemporary such as Mexican Revolution they were, in essence, conflicts over land tenure.
Despite intense modernization campaigns by governments Like that of Benito Juárez, until 1950 just over 57% of the Mexican population lived in rural areas, many in extreme conditions. poverty. This figure has decreased over the course of the 20th century, falling to 29% in 1990 and 22% in 2010. Most of this population is concentrated in the states of the southern fringe of the country: Oaxaca, Chiapas and Tabasco , but Zacatecas, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz also stand out.
There is also a link between indigenous communities and rural life, so that most of the communities The remaining indigenous peoples conserve their traditional ways of life, linked to agriculture and the exploitation of endemic species.