Agricultural Volunteering as a Way to Support Sustainable Rural Development and Food Security

Today, Russian agricultural volunteering is one of the most popular areas in the field of volunteer efforts, which is only in the process of its institutional formation. Having begun as an occasional involvement of citizens to help farms in agricultural work, over the course of several years this type of volunteer initiative began to transform into a systematically structured volunteer program. The article provides definitions and essential characteristics of volunteers in the agricultural sector and examines the state of the named sphere of implementation of gratuitous labor from the point of view of the formation and emergence of the need for its application. The author provides a comprehensive analysis of the activities of specialized volunteers, whose functionality includes a wide range of tasks related to the development of agriculture and rural areas, promoting the ideas of agritourism. Successful domestic and foreign volunteer projects in the field of agriculture and organic production are presented. The experience of international non-profit organizations, which contributed to the formation of the general ideology and philosophy of the volunteer movement in the agricultural sector, as well as to the promotion of social relations and the values of mutual assistance and public solidarity in jointly solving problems of agricultural development, is considered. The article presents international standards for the organization of volunteer work and indicates the rights and responsibilities of volunteers and the host party represented by the organizer of volunteer activities. Considerable attention is paid to the value-semantic of volunteers involved in agricultural projects around the world.