HUMAN CAPITAL AND SUSTAINABILITY OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT

The strategies and policies of agricultural and rural development, within the overall long-term area development, traditionally lean on natural-resource capital and certain differential-rent advantages. New dimensions of the agricultural and rural multi-functionality of areas in the zones of large industrial and urban agglomerations and the inevitable processes of degradation of natural capital, stress the role of science in the process of sustaining the level of overall production potential. This presumes a certain degree of substitution of natural capital with human, primarily intellectual capital. This is the basis for considering the creating possibilities and transfer methods for new scientific knowledge, in the function of reaching a strategic developmental goal - long-term sustainability of the agricultural and rural development of a certain agro-ecological or economic-geographical region.