Economic and Production Capacity of AIC

Abstract

Rural areas in the European Union (27 member states) make up 91% of the territory and over 56% of the population (European Commission, 2008). They include a great variety of cultures, landscapes, natural environments, and economic activities that shape different rural identities. Farming and forestry remain crucial for land use and the management of natural resources in the EU's rural areas, and as a platform for economic diversification in rural communities. In Slovenia as well, rural areas represent a significant part of its space and society. Slovenia is one of the smallest European countries, sharing borders with Italy, Austria and Croatia. 2,050,189 people live in a land area of 20,273 km 2 , for an average population density of 101,1 inhabitants per km 2 (January 1st 2011). In 2010, the country's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was 17,560€. Slovenia's location between the Alps, the Dinaric mountains, the Adriatic Sea and the Pannonian Plain is the reason for the country's diverse climate: there is a continental climate in central Slovenia, an Alpine climate in the northwest, and a sub-Mediterranean climate in the coastal area and its hinterlands. Consequently, landscapes and agricultural production conditions are also diverse, as are the cultural identities of individual rural areas. Based on the 2002 population census, rural areas make up more than 90% of the territory and are inhabited by 58% of the total population (Perpar, 2007). The Slovenian countryside is highly heterogenous, distinguished by various natural conditions and obstacles, and diversified demographic, economic, and social structures (Perpar & Kovačič, 2002). In recent decades rural areas have been exposed to many different changes and challenges, and have had to cope with a range of economic and societal needs, some of them new. Agricultural and forestry activities make rural areas the most important providers of food, and important contributors to the production of fibers and construction materials. Furthermore, rural areas are increasingly important as centers of energy production, from biomass and other renewable sources such as water resources, and have rich biodiversity and highly varied natural environments. They are also important from an economic aspect since new economic sectors are now developing in rural areas, such as rural tourism and other activities linked to their natural and cultural assets. But they are relatively isolated areas, removed from the centers of decision-making, economically and socially heterogeneous, largely dependent on natural resources, highly sensitive to exogenous modernization dynamics through linkages with urban areas, with often a kind of collective www.intechopen.com Rural Development-Contemporary Issues and Practices 284 sense of lasting crisis and a deterministic and fatalistic vision of the future. At the same time, rural areas are a specific type of complex system, a social-ecological system shaped by the relationships between ecological and human subsystems (Ambrosio-Albalá & Bastiaense...