Rural flight

People can also move into town to seek higher wages, educational access and other urban amenities; examples of pull factors.

Government policies to combat rural flight include campaigns to expand services to the countryside, such as electrification or distance education.

Economic conditions that can counter rural depopulation include commodities booms, the expansion of outdoor-focused tourism, and a shift to remote work, or exurbanization.

To some extent, governments generally seek only to manage rural flight and channel it into certain cities, rather than stop it outright as this would imply taking on the expensive task of building airports, railways, hospitals, and universities in places with few users to support them, while neglecting growing urban and suburban areas.

Lack of large employment industries, high urban mortality, and low food supplies all served as checks keeping pre-industrial cities much smaller than their modern counterparts.

As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers arose, cities began to support larger populations, sparking the start of rural flight on a massive scale.

New capital market systems and the railroad network began the trend towards larger farms that employed fewer people per acre.

These larger farms used more efficient technologies such as steel plows, mechanical reapers, and higher-yield seed stock, which reduced human input per unit of production.

During the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, large numbers of people fled rural areas of the Great Plains and the Midwest due to depressed commodity prices and high debt loads exacerbated by several years of drought and large dust storms.

While a small family farm typically produced a wide range of crop, garden, and animal products—all requiring substantial labor—large industrial farms typically specialize in just a few crop or livestock varieties, using large machinery and high-density livestock containment systems that require a fraction of the labor per unit produced.

[8] The consolidation of the feed, seed, processed grain, and livestock industries has meant that there are fewer small businesses in rural areas.

Some scholars have also attributed rural flight to the effects of globalization as the demand for increased economic competitiveness leads people to choose capital over labor.

A study conducted in 2012 indicated that a significant proportion of rural flight in India occurred due to social factors such as migration with household, marriage, and education.

The 1930s Dust Bowl in the United States, for example, led to the flight of 2.5 million people from the Plains by 1940, many to the new cities in the West.

Massive influxes in urban areas, combined with difficult living conditions, have prompted some scholars to link the drought to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria.

Landflucht ("flight from the land") refers to the mass migration of peasants into the cities that occurred in Germany (and throughout most of Europe) in the late 19th century.

[31] In 1900 alone, the Prussian provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Posen, Silesia, and Pomerania lost about 1,600,000 people to the cities,[32] where these former agricultural workers were absorbed into the rapidly growing factory labor class;[33] One of the causes of this mass-migration was the decrease in rural income compared to the rates of pay in the cities.

The first, beginning in the 1850s when 82% of the Swedish population lived in rural areas, and continuing till the late 1880s, was mostly due to push factors in the countryside related to poverty, unemployment, low agricultural wages, debt peonage, semi-feudalism, and religious oppression by the State church.

Many of these first emigrants were unskilled, barely literate laborers who sought farm work or daily wage labour in the cities.

Conversely, peripheral regions of the USSR, like Central Asia, experienced gains, contradicting the general pattern of rural-urban migration of this period.

Increased diversification of crops and labor shortages were primary contributors to the gains in rural population in the periphery.

This exodus of young women further exacerbated the demographic transitions occurring in rural communities as the rate of natural increase dropped precipitously over the course of the 20th century.

"[43] During this period, Mexican agriculture grew at an average rate of 5.7% outpacing the natural increase of 3% of the rural population.

In 1957, the Mexican government began to regulate the price of maize through massive imports in order to keep low urban food costs.

Inspired by the work of Norman Borlaug, farmers that employed hybrid seeds and fertilizer supplements were able to double or even triple their yields per acre.

The combined effects of the maize price regulation and the Green Revolution was the consolidation of small farms into larger estates.

[43] Rural migrants to cities face several challenges that may hinder their quality of life upon moving into urbanized areas.

Massive influxes in rural population can lead to severe housing shortages, inadequate water and energy supply, and general slum-like conditions throughout cities.

Once in the city, employers may attempt to take advantage of these women preying on their unfamiliarity with labor laws and social networks on which to rely.

In the worst of cases, destitution may force women into prostitution, exposing them to social stigma and the risks of sexually transmitted diseases.