Broadband and trust key rural concerns

A new Cork Declaration — ‘A Better Life in Rural Areas’— emerged after Cork 2.0, a two-day conference on rural development and agriculture attended by more than 330 stakeholders from across Europe.

Addressing attendees in Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork, conference chairman Heino von Meyer, of OECD’s Berlin office, explained how the discussion groups logically arrived at formulating the ten-point declaration.

Using a similar approach to the first Cork Declaration of 20 years ago, it was a bottom-up process, with passionate debate in parallel workshops, translating into thousands of post-it notes, from which the Declaration was distilled.