Empresa Rural Verdedesarrollando criterios de sustentabilidad con la comunidad rural

Resumen

Productive projects in rural areas of Latin America are a strategy used to fight against economic poverty and help preserve existing ecosystems. These projects are usually implemented by cooperation agencies, NGOs and government organisations. However, they often fail to achieve the desired level of sustainability. We therefore propose the concept of Green Rural Enterprises (GRE), as a means of moving productive projects towards greater sustainability. GREs aim to ensure rational use of natural resources, regional development, good business sense and the development of the rural community. GREs are an attempt to imbue rural productive projects with a clear business-oriented outlook, taking conservation as their basic guiding principle and seeking to ensure the engagement, participation and growth of local groups from the rural community, thus becoming part of a broader- scale spatial planning strategy. The work carried out with the La Mancha en Movimento ecotourism group has proved a key driver in the design of criteria and of appropriate assessment measures, striving at all times to ensure that the local community becomes the author of its own development.