Just a wild guess on my part - but slum lord Valerie Jarrett comes to mind.
She is a Marxist, and this sounds like something totally unnecessary and inappropriate she would initiate.
From another article:
The council will also focus on job creation in those [rural] areas, bringing access to credit, creating “digital and physical networks,” expanding “ecosystem markets” and developing “renewable energy projects.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will provide the taxpayer money and administrative support for the new committee.
Obama’s Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, will chair the rural council.
This new USDA venture comes on the heels of several other like-minded and costly Obama initiatives at the agency. In the last few months the USDA has doled out tens of millions of dollars to bring healthy foods to the inner city, recruit more food-stamp recipients and track what minority public school children eat for lunch.
Just a few days ago the agency dropped $10 million on a Farmers Market Promotion Program that will bring fresh and healthy cuisine to low-income neighborhoods (“food deserts”) across the country. Last month the USDA launched a sophisticated internet-based mapping tool (Food Desert Locator) that identifies areas with “limited access to affordable and nutritious foods.”