Entrepreneurs can save American heartland, rural expert says.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

KANSAS CITY, Mo._Creating a culture of entrepreneurism may be the last best chance to rescue rural America from its long, slow slide to economic and political obsolescence, according to a rural development expert.

Unless rural America can justify its existence to the suburbanites who now make up the political majority, rural America, he said, is on track to become home to the very rich and the very poor, with no middle class to keep it economically viable.

"The middle class are leaving many parts of rural America. Without them, rural America will become the involuntary home of the poor and the chosen home of the pleasure seekers, producing a rural ghetto and a rural playground," said the development expert, Karl Stauber, president of the Northwest Area Foundation of St. Paul, Minn.

The 2000 census shows that political power now resides in the suburbs and that suburbanites question why they should subsidize others, urban or rural.

"Simply put," Stauber said, "the majority of Americans now ask: `Why should I take money out of my pockets to make your life better? What do I get in return?' "

Stauber was one of a series of speakers Monday at an annual conference sponsored by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank's Center for the Study of Rural America.

The speakers said that public policy on rural America focused almost exclusively on agriculture and is failing. A new policy that nurtures emerging rural entrepreneurs as well as existing businesses and agriculture, might light the way out of the wilderness, they said.