Agriculture

Editorial More than half of the human population lives and works in rural areas, mainly engaged in agricultural activities: agriculture represents the main source of income in developing Countries, but it is significantly present also in the so called “developed areas” of the world. This ancient human activity produces foods and uses land. In a world where the demand of food is growing very quickly, quality and quantity of food are at the basis of the healthiness of millions people. On the other hand, agricultural activities might cause environmental resource depletion and pollution. Therefore, rural areas are directly linked with the wellbeing of entire communities, as clearly demonstrated by the recent outbreaks of mad caw disease and avian flue, started from rural settings. Despite their social relevance, rural areas are largely neglected by research, prevention and welfare, and nowadays rural inhabitants are suffering an evident gap in life quality, sanitation, income, and distribution of welfare benefits, including occupational health care, if compared to the urban dwellers. Rural communities are organized in villages, where agriculture and related activities are being carried out, with the typical lack of a clear separation between living and working environments, and living and working time. Due to this specificity, very often entire families are involved in agricultural activities, sometimes in a non-official way, particularly in the family-based enterprises, where an important proportion of elderly and children are present. The rural village is the house of these people and the place of their activities and, for this reason, it is the target of any preventive intervention in rural areas. Only an healthy village, made by healthy people, can produce healthy food for the entire community, in the respect of living environment. This makes the centrality or rurality in the world, and this is the reason why, at the end of the 16th International Congress on Rural Health, held in Lodi (Italy) on June 2006 it has been approved the “Lodi Declaration on Healthy Villages”, and launched the Global Movement on Healthy Villages, official campaign of the World Health Organization. On of the major values of the Lodi Declaration is the awareness that, due to the complexity and specificity of rural areas, the approach to rural health needs to be holistic and cross sectional. Cross sectional among expertises, with the involvement of academia, rural health personnel, rural medical doctors, among disciplines, with the involvement of medicine, occupational medicine, agronomic sciences, veterinary medicine, and among countries, with the involvement either of the “developed” world, or of developing countries and countries in transition. Having in mind that the “developed” world makes large use of food commodities coming from developing world, while the latter needs - for the production of these commodities - technology and plant protection products often developed and produced in industrialized countries. In the frame of the activities addressed at promoting the global campaign “Healthy Village” in the world, an important component needs to be addressed at occupational health an safety in agriculture, and a particular attention needs to be addressed at the developing world. Hot spots of these activities are an unacceptable high number of accidents and fatalities, underreporting of occupational diseases, lack of health care structures, lack of adequately trained rural health personnel. This is the reason why this editorial activity of the African Newsletter is important and timely: it is supposed, hopefully, to be one of the steps toward the development of the global campaign “Healthy Villages” in the African Continent.