La forêt dans l'économie rurale

This article is a attempt to consider forest land and production as a part of rural local economies. While evolution has in the past tended to segregate forest and agriculture and other activies and to weaken the ties between forest and rural population, one can observe a reverse trend these recent years (in terms of policy aims at least). Forest appears more and more as an element of rural space. They cannot live ecologicaly and economically as well without being integrated in the spatial and social system in which they are physically included. These remarks and hypotheses are followed by suggestions for developping research along two lines: (i) wood and forest sector-analysis in the regional context : (ii) system analysis of the interconnections between different space consuming activities at the local level (spatial and social).