An original distinction between urban and rural areas within a country has assumed that urban areas provide a different way of life and usually a higher standard of living than are found in rural areas (UNDESA 2020). A small urban center is surrounded by a large rural area. The term “rural” describes environments with lower population and business densities outside urban centers, whereby any geographical unit such as region, country, province, or municipality can be divided into urban and rural. Rural value chains describe interactions of businesses primarily situated in rural areas and generating the rural income. Along with economic growth, disasters accelerate transformations in rural value chains and the strive to become more global while contracting in their local extensions. The value at risk in a given location widely depends on the susceptibility of people and environment to a natural disaster, the costs to repair, and possibilities to innovate. The business disturbances are manifold, complex, and not entirely adverse. We come up with four cases of successful in some aspects controversial alterations of global rural value chains: palm oil value chain in ASEAN, the sixth industry in Japan, rural tourism in Asia, and winter tourism in Austria and analyze the impacts of natural disasters in case studies. A different meaning of disasters becomes perceivable for each income group. Concepts of disaster vulnerability and disaster resilience to rural value chains are presented and followed by a system view on global rural value according to four income groups of countries. Their generated value is more dependent on climate and extreme weather events than what is the case with urban value chains. They contain almost all global agricultural production, a major part of global tourism, and minor shares of industry and other services than tourism. Global rural value chains relate to business activities in non-central locations all over the world.