this must become a priority for those responsible for regional policies whose actions are currently informed by partially false or incomplete assessments due to a lack of reliable and homogeneous figures the following paragraphs set out the modelling proposed for estimating the agricultural population in urban areas and then for the same population in a rural environment this particular stratum of urban and periurban farmers plays a vital role in structural transformations in the agricultural sector because of the environment in which they live and carry out their activities eg market gardening horticulture poultry farming fishing settlement dynamics also require developing new and simple indicators to monitor these changes