Monumental changes have occurred in the South, i.e., the loss of many farm and nonfarm residents to urban areas, farms becoming larger and more mechanized, the growth of manufacturing employment, and the narrowing of income gaps between rural and urban areas, and between the South and the non-South. Political and social changes have accompanied these economic changes. Many of the institutions that characterized the traditional South such as sharecropping, one-party politics, and demogogic preoccupation with race have disappeared or are no longer important. Yet, despite these changes, the rural South lags behind urban areas, and rural areas outside the South, in many dimensions of human resource development. Large commercial farmers have been the main beneficiaries of technological changes and agricultural policies. Blacks have not shared proportionately in the growth of jobs. Because of the uneveness of economic progress, too many people in the rural South are poor, have inferior educations, suffer from poor health, nutrition, housing, and inadequate health care. Therefore the Task Force has made various recommendations dealing with a wide range of issues affecting human resource development in the rural South. They include reform in the financing of education, in state and local taxes, and in health delivery systems; strengthening the political effectiveness of low income people and minorities; strengthening union membership; restructuring the South's income maintenance system; and improvements in training and employment, job creation, and the rural credit system. (NQ)