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Developing solutions to rural poverty is particularly challenging for two primary reasons: the lack of homogeneity across rural areas and discrimination against rural areas. In developing policies and programs to combat rural poverty, the temptation is to strive for an overarching planone plan applied consistently across all rural areas. However, rural poverty lacks unifying characteristics that would permit the application of a single program on a worldwide basis, or in the case of the United States, even on a nationwide basis. Accordingly, lawmakers and policymakers must look more specifically at the geographical areas to be served by rural poverty policies and programs to ensure that they are not based on inaccurate or inadequate foundations and assumptions. However, to lawmakers and policymakers, who tend to seek generalities and commonality in developing laws, policies, and programs, a geography-specific approach to rural poverty sounds both counterintuitive and unfair. Geography-specific approaches, by definition, do not have general applicability but, instead, turn on location. Although lawmakers regularly tuck geography-specific provisions into bills, the notion of granting benefits to some places and not to others is often condemned as unfair favoritism. Nevertheless, the lack of homogeneity across rural areas guarantees that a one-size-fits-all approach to rural poverty will necessarily fail.
In addition, in at least some instances, rural discrimination comes into play, whether intentional or inadvertent. Lack of unfettered resources means that government funding is always a matter of setting priorities, and rural poverty, even severe rural poverty, is not always seen as a priority. To be sure, governments have the power to abandon any attempts at ameliorating rural poverty. But to the extent that governments or other entities undertake to address rural poverty, their attempts will continue to fail until the lack of rural homogeneity and the realities of rural discrimination are acknowledged in creating programs and policies.
I. INTRODUCTION
A common metaphor of the 1990s was the "North-South divide," which separated the world into wealthy developed countries (the North) and poorer developing countries (the South).1 Although enormously oversimplified,2 this image tended to focus on wealth and poverty as associated with the economic development of nation states.3 This image had power in making wealth and poverty visual and mapping it on a globe, but it masked the true...