Modernization processes of agro-food industry and rural areas in Poland, in compliance with challenges and versatile conditions are the fundamental, and at the same time very complex problem. Significant influence on the direction of taken activities in the range of the modernization of agriculture, agricultural markets and in rural areas have as well processes connected with globalization of economical systems, integration with European Communities, or macro-economical solutions resulting from establishments of World Trade Organization. Taking into consideration all of these conditions activating the process of modernization, in this sector becomes the important task for state policy. Former observations show that nowadays policy of inputs directed to research and development (R+D) is conditioned of many dependencies and hasn't brought, as for the time being, fully satisfactory results in view of significant improvements and rate of realized modernization processes in the agricultural economy and on rural areas.

As from May 1, 2004 the new member states of the European Union became covered by assistance financed from the organisation's general budget. The means for this assistance are drawn from structural funds (the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund, the Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance) and the Cohesion Fund. In 2004-2006 the means available from the structural funds will be allocated in the EU's new member states mainly to the development of infrastructure, improvement in the quality of human resources and in the production environment. Means from the Cohesion Fund will be used in these countries for co-financing investment projects in the sphere of environmental protection and investments serving the construction of trans-European transport routes.
The experience of the poorer EU countries (Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal) shows that the use of means coming from the EU budget contributes to growth in GDP, investment outlays and employment as well as to a decrease in the rate of unemployment, a rise in the level of education of the working population, etc. The use of means from the EU budget can be expected to lead to positive changes also in the new member states and help diminish the disproportion in the level of development of the new member states and that of the old fifteen EU countries.

The article is a synthesis of considerations contained in a book titled Państwowe gospodarstwa rolne w procesie przemian systemowych w Polsce (State-owned Farms in the Process of Systemic Transformation in Poland) which was published by the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development of the Polish Academy of Science (IRWiR PAN).
The aim of the work was to present facts, analyses and the broadest possible knowledge about transformations in the state-owned farms. It represents an attempt at explaining why restructuring processes in the Polish state-owned farms were so radical and at finding out whether their privatisation could have been accomplished in a different and more successful way.

The article deals with problems posed by the organization of education in rural areas at the time of transformations taking place in Poland. The starting point for considerations on the subject is the question about the presences of advantages of scale in the universal system of education and about the relations between school and the village community, parents in particular. The authors of the article are trying to prove that the liquidation of rural schools that have a small number of pupils should not be considered exclusively from the point of view of a temporary reduction in the budget expenditures of a commune. School constitutes the social centre of village life and its liquidation produces in the long run negative effects for the local community. The authors also draw attention to the fact that an increase in the number of pupils attending the same school impacts negatively on the quality of instruction and upbringing. The aim of the article is to present an alternative solution which envisages the formation of the so-called Small Schools. These are institutions formed by associations of the residents of villages to replace the liquidated schools that were financed by the local authorities. The authors present the characteristic features of such Small Schools and data attesting to the fact that the cost of financing them can be low and that they ensure a higher quality of education. Additionally, the formation of such schools is a factor stimulating the activity of local community and the development of the social capital of villages. The authors describe barriers to the formation of Small Schools in Poland and chances that they create for a multi-directional development of rural areas.

The characteristic feature of the agricultural sector in many countries is the fact that farms, which can be treated as a specific type of an enterprise, may be handed over, unlike enterprises in other sectors, to family members. The property accumulated through generations is handed down to the successor, to the succeeding generation. The process of transmission of farms is called succession. As it is in the case of any family business, the transmission of a farm to a successor constitutes one of the critical stages in its development because it entails not only the handing over of property but also the transmission of managerial responsibility and control over the family. Thus, succession has not only economic aspects (transmission of property, assets, managerial functions) but also social aspects (a change of social role or professional status, for example, when a person earlier deciding about the conditions of existence changes into a subordinated person or a person vocationally active retires), legal aspects (the transmission of ownership rights) and psychological aspects (concern over one's livelihood). The development of a farm constitutes a cycle and can be referred to a logistic function if the language of mathematics is applied. Succession has a multidisciplinary character and it exerts a strong influence on the operation of the agricultural sector and especially on the shape of the market of land and, consequently on the relations between the remaining factors of agricultural production.
In this paper the probability function of the logit type was applied to analyse factors determining the probability of succession.
In the case of farms decisive for succession - both in the positive and negative sense - are demo-graphic factors (age and the number of members forming a family) and economic factors. An increase in the successor's age by one year causes that the probability of succession grows by 87.8 %.
However, succession is determined also by the source of income earned by the family of farmers. The more stable and certain this source is the greater becomes the probability of succession. Other factors, such as financial status (acreage, property, etc.) have a minimal or limited influence on the probability of succession.

Basing on the opinions of farmers the authors of the article have constructed a linear programming model to analyse the possibilities of altering the allocation of means destined for the development of rural areas and ventures increasing the competitiveness of Polish agriculture. The conducted analyses have indicated that the preferences of small and medium-sized farms differ from the preferences of large farms. Therefore, different activities create opportunities for the development of these three types of farms. Consequently, the optimal allocation of means for the development of rural areas is different in the opinion of the owners of small and medium-sized farms and in the opinion of large farmers.

In the second half of the 20th century efforts were launched in various countries of the world that led to the creation of the foundations of an organisational system referred to as the "seed industry", which groups plant breeding and seed producing firms, as well as institutions responsible for the correct functioning of the sector. Progressing globalisation has resulted in the intensification of concentration processes in the seed industry. At present, the world production of seeds is dominated by several firms which operate on the global scale and which engage in the production of seeds, chemicals for agriculture, medicines and biotechnological products. Simultaneously, the process of the state's withdrawal from supporting the practical plant breeding has started. Also observable is the growing role of self-government organisations grouping plant growers and producers of seeds, which begin to replace the state in the decision-making processes relating to the seed industry.
Since the early 1990s the plant breeding sector in Poland has received assistance amounting to PLN 0.5 billion, which was destined for the restructuring of the existing companies. Despite that assistance the share of certified seeds in the total amount of grain used for sowing has decreased to 6% and the share of certified seed-potatoes has slumped to 3%. The export of Polish seeds is far lower than the export of seeds from the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Simultaneously, foreign firms are intensifying their expansion onto to the Polish market. The area of seed plantations of foreign varieties of spring barley is already larger than that of the seed plantations of Polish varieties of barley, whereas the area of seed plantations of foreign varieties of winter wheat is now only slightly smaller than the area of plantations supplying Polish varieties of seeds. Subsidies to plant breeding will be liquidated in 2007. Therefore, there is an urgent need to spin off the plant breeding entities from the existing companies and start ownership transformations using capital provided by foreign investors and/or by the employees-shareholders of the spun off entities.

For a long time the rural community had not been able to ensure education to its own members and to create a sufficiently attractive offer for those of its few members who had managed to become well educated. This situation did not change even during the early period of People's Poland when masses of young people from rural areas were given a chance to raise their social status or in the later years when the children of peasants and workers were ensured privileges in access to university education by means of a system designed to eliminate significant inequalities in the educational chances of various social groups. It is not surprising then that throughout the post-war period (until the year 2000) the rural community had a negative migration balance and that young people constituted the category of the most frequently migrating inhabitants of the rural areas. According to the results of various analyses, such migrations resulted in the outflow of talented and active people who did not see any prospects for a better future in the countryside and could not accept the conditions prevailing there. In the result of these and many other processes the Polish rural community was in a deep crisis at the time of the change of the political and economic system in Poland. The rural community is generally considered to be a serious barrier hampering the transformation process.
The need for changes in the rural areas does not evoke any serious reservations at present. These areas require the introduction of essential changes from without and from within, the latter being immanent changes that have its source in the local community itself. The changes from within are particularly important since they release in a natural way human capital hidden in the rural areas. However, to make this capital work people able to shoulder the process of the rural population's activation are needed. It seems that rural intelligentsia has a particularly great role to play in this respect. Who are the people forming this group? What is their place in the structure of the rural community? What does their material situation look like? What were the circumstances that made them settle in the countryside? Do they feel to be a part of the rural community? This paper represents an attempt at providing answers to these questions.

The paper presents integration ties that exist in the Polish poultry farming sector. The author describes both vertical and horizontal integration in the sector, drawing attention to the advantages of co-operation within an integrated system.

The question of social capital is being more and more widely discussed. The phenomenon and the notion of social capital are not new, but they are being approached and discussed in the context of new concepts of sustainable development of rural areas. The authors of the article present the main conclusions and observations from an international Summer Academy devoted to the issue of social capital of rural areas that was organized in Finland'. They also present, using the examples of Finish villages, the process and effects of the strengthening of the social capital of rural communities.

The article represents an attempt at analysing and evaluating the diversification of the rural population's incomes and, in particular, at analysing the problem of low incomes. The main questions underlying all considerations are those pertaining to the scope and depth of income poverty, to its differentiation in the group of farming population and in other social-vocational groups. Objective and subjective poverty were adopted as the main analytical categories. The analysis of incomes achieved by the farming population was launched in full awareness of the fact that income is not the sole indicator of the standard of living. However, incomes are the principal factor shaping consumption and they represent a simplified measure serving to assess the standard of living because they constitute the essential condition for the feeling of satisfaction, usefulness or well-being. In turn, incomes allocated to the operation of a farm decide about the possibilities of its development.
The analysis covered the socio-economic groups of households run by farmers and by employees owning farms. Unlike in the case of other vocational groups, such households are characterised by a specific combination through which the functions of a farm as a place of work become merged with the functions of a household producing an entity called a family farm. Because of this interdependence the point of reference is not only the farm and the farmer himself but the household and all its members who may have different sources of income.

The main aim of this paper was to establish whether and to what an extent spatial barriers (such as distance, time and costs) decide about the rural population's access to medical and welfare services. Analyses were conducted to examine the differences in the availability of such services existing between and within the selected communes. This made it possible to identify the line of division between the centre and the peripheries in local systems. The selected communes were characterized by similar development problems, chiefly in terms of the demographic, settlement and economic structure, and a similar level of development of infrastructure. Simultaneously, each of the chosen communes was characterized - as the conducted analyses have revealed, by a specific and unique spatial system determining to a very large extent the availability of public services. A particularly significant factor determining the rural population's access to these services proved to be the type of settlement dominating in villages forming a given commune, their location in relation to the main roads, their central or peripheral location within the commune, the distance separating them from towns and the organisation of public transportation in terms of frequency and direction of the serviced connections. In other words the classic, concentric arrangement of zones characterised by various degrees of availability of the services in question was often modified by other factors determining the specificity of individual communes.

The self-government reform has equipped the local councils with a wide range of significant instruments for influencing local economic structures, supporting initiatives of the local community, attracting outside investors, developing fiscal policy, and managing communal property, etc. Nevertheless, the actual operations of self-government depend on particular people and their capacity to fulfil the function of local authorities.
The article presents the results of research designed to identify factors that exert an influence on the activity of local authorities in the process of stimulating socio-economic growth in the analysed communes, and to determine the role of non-government organizations in the process of stimulating the activity in these regions. The results of the conducted analyses have made it possible to formulate the following conclusions:
In the active communes the members of local councils were better educated, their vocational structure was more diversified, and they mostly represented a pro-market orientation. In the management of such active communes strategic and long-term approach dominated. These communes had successes in obtaining non-budgetary means and were creating better conditions for the development of business activity. The inhabitants of communes where the local government was active usually indicated heads of village authorities or mayors as leaders. The communes selected for the survey have a poorly developed network on of non-government organizations, which is a fact attesting to the very limited participation of the local community in the socio-economic life.

The sources of renewable energy have been attracting much attention in the recent years, which can be attributed to the continually intensifying exploitation of mineral fuels and the steadily diminishing deposits of these fuels. In addition, according to some forecasts, the demand for energy is likely to double by 2035. In the light of these forecasts Poland, as a country possessing large areas that can be used for the cultivation of energy-yielding plants, is in a fairly good situation. However, as an EU member state Poland is obligated (in accordance with directive 2001 /77EC) to obtain 7.5% of the utilised energy from renewable sources by 2010 and twice as much by 2020. Therefore, the time has come to seriously deal with the problem of production of bio-mass as one of the most profitable sources of renewable energy. It should be noted that the use of renewable energy sources produces many positive effects both on regional and local scale. These positive effects include an improvement in the condition of the natural environment and greater safety as far as the supply of energy is concerned, but the most important thing is the opportunity for farms to obtain additional means which can help improve their financial situation. The article describes some sources of renewable energy and presents possibilities of financially assisting farms that generate such energy.