I'm not saying it's only agriculture, but rural areas give much more to urban areas than they receive back, evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.
In the past you could certainly say that urban areas give back just as much or even more, when factories where concentrated in cities. Today the factories are not only in the cities.
In poor 'African' farming communities this is true. In any even slightly developed country the farms are not self sufficient: they focus on a cash crop and go to town to buy things that they don't grow. Sure any rural farm could be self sufficient, but division of labor makes them far more efficient - at the expensive of needing the city to provide all the logistics that make it possible for them to get things they don't or can't grow (can't meaning something that doesn't grow in their climate, while don't means they could grow it but they do not).
Materially it is a fact that urban areas need rural areas to survive, while rural areas needs don't need the urban areas.
The country side can be self sufficient, the city can never be. Thousands of trucks deliver excess goods from the country side to the city every day. Saying that it is the city that supports the country side is fancy accounting.
> evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.
Where on earth did you get this impression? I have lived in both small rural towns and large cities, and this is hogwash.
In the past you could certainly say that urban areas give back just as much or even more, when factories where concentrated in cities. Today the factories are not only in the cities.