• Set up a specific European rural policy is an essential condition to ensure social, economic and territorial cohesion in the European Union.

• The recognition of the rural territories as development poles, and neither only as natural and agricultural spaces, is a precondition to stimulate advantageous and balanced exchanges between the urban and rural poles and to motivate the convergent mobilization of all their actors.

A balanced spatial development based on urban and rural poles of development is necessary to meet the objectives of Lisbon and Gothenburg Strategies and the aim of territorial cohesion.

• The rural pole of development is an inhabited, significantly rural area where the social, economic and territorial evolutions are led within the framework of an integrated and prospective development plan.

The territorial development plan determines the objectives of result in short, medium and long term. It specifies the guidelines for development, the human and material means to achieve the results targeted. The civil society, public and private actors must be the partners for it.

• Restriction of the rural world to the functionalities of agricultural or recreationnal functions would constitute an impoverishment of the society as a whole.

Agriculture and forestry are structuring branches of the rural areas and their actors are partners of the rural life in the territorial development.