Organic farming, which is considered to fulfil numerous functions in the development of rural areas, began to develop in Portugal in the 1990s. In 2002 there were approximately 800 farms that applied organic methods in Portugal and they operated on not more than 1% of the total area of arable land existing in that country, which gave it the last position among the EU member-states. The article analyses the processes of development of organic farming and its institutionalization, and presents the profiles of farmers running organic farms. It also deals with the myths that have accrued around the phenomenon of organic farming.

The tendency to use every piece of arable land prevailing in Poland in the result of a definite agricultural policy adopted after the Second World War and pursued until the end of the 1980s left Poles convinced that every farm engages in production. The ownership of a farm began to be under-stood as the use of a farm. This is reflected in the formulation contained in one of the Polish legal acts which states that it should be surmised (without the need of documenting the fact) that "the owner of land or the tenant, the payer of the agricultural tax or the tax on incomes from special sectors carry out agricultural activity."
The situation began to change in the early 1990s when the first farms appeared that did not engage in agricultural production. This meant that these farms did not have a holder.
The notion "farm holder" is commonly used in the literature and legal acts of West European countries, which indicates that it is useful in the contemporary conditions. Since the farm holder does not necessarily have to be the farm's owner its seems purposeful to examine the definitions "farm" and "farm holder" in the light of the notion "farm owner." The triad of these notions constitutes the subject of an analysis presented in this text. The author refers in the analysis to definitions applied in the Polish legal acts, especially in the Civil Code.

The article presents the results of analyses covering the social, economic and demographic structure of Poland's non-farm rural population, that are based on the data provided by the National Census of May 2002. Special attention was given in these analyses to the non-farm rural population's breakdown into the groups of employed, unemployed and vocationally passive persons as well as to the structure of each of these groups according to the criterion of sex, age and the level of education. The structure of the group of employed persons was additionally analysed in accordance with the criterion of the main place of work and the status of employment (hired employees and self-employed persons), whereas the structure of the group of unemployed persons was additionally examined in accordance with the criterion of duration of the search for a job. All the analysed structures of the non-farm rural population were compared with the analogous structures of the urban population. One of the main aims of such comparison was to check and concretize the hypothesis that the non-farm rural population had a worse position on the labour market than the population living in towns. The results of the conducted analyses have proved this hypothesis to be true. Its correctness has been confirmed by the fact that: a) the employment index is lower for the group of non-farm rural population than for the group of urban population (33.1% and 41.2%, respectively, of persons aged 15 and over); (b) the rate of unemployment is higher in the group of non-farm rural population than in the group of urban population (31.0% and 22.1%, respectively); (c) the percentage of vocationally passive persons is higher in the group of non-farm rural population than in the group of urban population (48.6% and 43.2%, respectively, of persons aged 15 and over); d) the search for a job is longer in the case of the unemployed persons from rural areas than in the case of the unemployed persons living in towns (the search for a job lasted longer than 24 months for 27.7% and 24.5% of the unemployed, respectively).
The presented indicators were clearly worse both in the case of men and women living in rural areas than in the case of men and women residing in towns. They were also worse for all the age groups of the non-farm rural population. On the other hand, the differences in indicators characterising the non-farm rural population and urban population were minimal or non-existent in the groups of persons representing the same level of education. The latter suggests that one of the main factors increasing the non-farm rural population's chances for employment may be the rise in the general level of its education, which is currently far lower than that of the urban population.

The main aim of the paper was to present the situation of the rural households in terms of their level of the selected needs fulfillment. In consideration of the fact that a basic restrictive factor of the needs fulfillments is income, the paper focuses on the differentiation of the incomes among rural household pointing that the rural households where the not paid sources are the main sources of income, the level of education is lower and there are many children are relatively worse off in terms of attained level of life.

The article deals with the evaluation of experiences and perspectives of Polish agriculture integration with the EU. Considering the one year period of functioning of Polish agriculture within the framework of the Common Agricultural Policy the special attention was paid on: the increase of exports of agricultural and food products, changes of prices of farm products and food, consequences of euro/zloty exchange rate variations and difficulties in utilization of negotiated conditions of membership. Short term challenges and long-term dilemmas of Polish rural areas and agriculture have been characterized.

In this article were considered the probable scenarios of changes on the EU milk market after 2008 and their financial and organisational effects. Also presented were some of the more important elements of the milk market up to the moment of the adoption of decisions included in the Agenda 2000. The organisation of the milk market in the European Union after 2008 will require relevant decisions which are certain to have financial effects for the EU budget. It cannot be excluded that some favourable circumstances will arise that will help limit the budget expenditure and reform the Common Agricultural Policy also in respect of the milk market. However, it is probable that because of the economic considerations the European Commission will put the emphasis on a solution that is likely to generate less serious financial effects, i.e. on a two-range milk quota system or on the preservation of the status quo of Agenda 2000 after 2008.

The text deals with the problem of cohesion between the local potential of the rural communes of Łódzkie province and the directions of pro-development initiatives launched by the local authorities. The authors' considerations boil down to a comparison between the weak and strong points of the analysed communes, as subjectively perceived by the local decision-makers, and the number and directions of actions taken to support local development. The results of this comparison make it possible to formulate a conclusion that the local potential determines to a minimal degree only the directions of activities undertaken by local governments. They reveal the low level of specialization in respect of the launched ventures which take into account these features of the local environment that attest to its specific character and form its potential.

One of the elements of the Polish agriculture's adjustment to the principles of functioning within the frameworks of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union was the resolution of problems connected with assistance for agricultural activities in the areas characterised by unfavorable development conditions, including the adoption of criteria that make it possible to arrive at a proper stratification of individual areas. EU countries apply various methods to solve the problem. In Poland, and in its Podlaskie province, two criteria have been used to identify the areas possessing conditions unfavorable for the development of agriculture, namely the quality of agricultural production space and the size of the population. In accordance with these two criteria of classification all but three rural communes of Podlaskie province have been included in the group of areas with unfavorable development conditions. The article represents an attempt at providing an answer to the question whether the adopted classification criteria, shown against the background of other factors, including the structural-organisational ones, are essential for differentiating the agricultural space of Podlaskie province.

The article describes the impact of globalisation processes on changes in organic agriculture and the market of food articles produced with the help of organic methods. An analysis of changes occur-ring in organic agriculture shows that it has undergone an essential transformation over the past two decades turning from agriculture having a local character into a sector linked through more and more numerous ties to the global system both in the sphere of production and in the sphere of distribution and consumption. In the last several years the emerging agro-food sector has become covered by the principal components of the global policy consisting of uniform legal regulations, a certification and accreditation system and in a large measure also by uniform principles of the international trade in ecological products. Still in the 1960s and in the 1970s most countries were applying their own national criteria to organic farming, and the production, distribution and consumption of food produced with the help of organic methods had a predominantly local character. In the following years the scale of the system's links began to increase steadily, with individual countries adopting uniform criteria of organic farming. Nearly all countries of the world have been gradually included in the international trade in products supplied by organic agriculture.