IFOAM EU Conference: Signal for Copenhagen

At the IFOAM EU Group Conference, that was held in Brussels and attended by around 200 people from 33 countries, the line to take at the international climate conference in Copenhagen from 7 – 18 December 2009 was decided. If the participants in Brussels had their way, government representatives in Copenhagen would be focusing their efforts on organic agriculture instead of on trading carbon credits. As people at the conference pointed out, it was not in the least clear what billions of dollars of compensation payments were supposed to achieve. They called instead for a worldwide per capita CO₂ allocation that was the same for all people all over the world. (Picture from right to left: Panel with E.U.Weizsäcker, H. Herren, J. Mousnier, T. Dosch, Niels Halberg, Urs Niggli - Pictures can be enlarged to screen size by double clicking)
The main theme of the conference, that was held at the Permanent Representation of Baden-Württemberg in Brussels, was carbon sequestration in organic agriculture and its advantages over the variants favoured by politicians. Members of the EU Commission attended and some gave talks. The real surprise came at the end of a whole day of patient listening: “Can we afford not to convert to organic agriculture?” was how Maria de los Angeles Benitez Salas summed it up. Mrs Salas is not a member of an organic organisation – she is the director with responsibility for sustainable development, quality and rural development in the EU Directorate-General for Agriculture. The reaction of Christopher Stopes, the President of IFOAM EU Group was immediate: “I’ve never heard a representative of the Commission make such a clear statement in favour of organic agriculture.” (Picture: IFOAM EU Group’s team of organisers)

The reaction to the new EU commissioner for agriculture has been cautious optimism. The new man is Dacian Ciolos and he comes from Romania. He will shortly take over from Mariann Fischer Boel from Denmark, who was cautiously supportive of organic agriculture. It is reported that during his education Ciolos spent six weeks on an organic farm in Brittany – something the organic community welcomed as a positive sign.

The conference in Brussels was structured round a number of high-calibre presentations that not only provided background information but also motivated those present.

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, the famous advocate of an eco-revolution, spoke about the problems of energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. The solution is an efficiency revolution with factor 5, to which organic agriculture can also make a contribution. “Factor Five” is the title of his new book that will appear in Britain in December. He wanted all people in the world to be given the same right to energy consumption and the same CO₂ pollution allocation. This is a hugely radical request and challenge to the industrialised countries, because it demands from them a much more drastic reduction in CO₂ emissions than they have planned. (Picture: E.U. von Weizsäcker talking to a Ph.D. student at the University of Kassel, Witzenhausen)

Hans Herren (picture), the chairman of the Millennium Institute and of the Swiss aid organisation Biovision, said that the consumer should be made to pay the external costs of food production at the checkout: “If you insisted on the consumer paying the true cost via the end price, the situation would change overnight.” He referred to the IAASTD report that he had been in charge of. “The multi-functional nature of agriculture must be developed further to create new jobs, so that things like protecting the ground water and energy production can be integrated.” He said it was important to support small farmers and family enterprises in developing countries. “We need a countryside that people can live in.”

Like Mr Herren, Niels Halberg, the director of the Danish ICROFS Institute, warned against a new version of the green revolution in Africa and elsewhere using pesticides, artificial fertilisers and hybrid seeds. There was no need for it, because the yields from organic agriculture in tropical and subtropical regions were often higher than conventional yields. He said that, although this was not necessarily true of world market products, it certainly applied in the case of basic foods.

Urs Niggli, the managing director of FiBL (Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture), highlighted the external costs of conventional agriculture. A British investigation has shown that they amount to £33 per hectare. “Organic agriculture with less ploughing increases biodiversity and raises the ability of the soil to bind CO₂.” The long-term DOK-experiments in Switzerland were proof of this. “80-90 % of worldwide CO₂ emissions could be sequestered in the soil if we converted all agriculture to organic.” This would mean 2.2 t of CO₂ per year and hectare would be stored in the soil (see picture).

Johan Cejie, an expert on eco-standards from the national association of certification bodies in Sweden (Krav), pointed out that the Swedish organic standards were soon to be widened to encompass criteria relevant to the climate. There are similarly no stipulations in the EU Organic Regulation for energy and water consumption. “Become climate smart” is the slogan driving the discussion. The aim is to reduce the emissions of both CO₂ and nitrogen. Mr Cejie gave as an example the requirement that 80 % of energy consumption in greenhouses will have to come from renewable energy, and insulation will have to be at a high level. In future, the maximum permissible emission per kilogram of product will be 0.25 kg of CO₂. However, as Mr Cejie added, most of the CO₂ was emitted after products were sold by the retail trade when goods were transported home. Urs Niggli from FiBL demanded that we should sell not only “bio” in future but also biodiversity. By no means a simple challenge but one that was possible to meet as some examples from good practice had demonstrated. (Picture on right: The Soil Association information booklets for the Copenhagen conference)

At a working group, Joachim Weckmann (picture), the CEO of the bread maker Märkisches Landbrot, was invited to give a presentation about his company and of their approach. A short time ago, Märkisches Brot was awarded the sustainability prize 2009. Weckmann gave a very convincing picture of their activities that went far beyond the usual commitment: photovoltaic panels on the roof of the bakery provide the company with electricity; they support an eco-project in Madagascar; an organic baker has been trained for a wholefood bakery in Kathmandu, and they support an agricultural project in the Sahel region in Africa. The company’sinternet site ensures transparency - their eco-footprint is there for all to see. Märkisches Landbrot is also a member of the association Regional & Fair.

Bioland chairman Thomas Dosch warned people about the lies propagated by the agro-chemical industry: “The industry makes statements with the intention of confusing people, so we can’t just rely on consumers.” Christopher Stopes, the successor to Francis Blake as president of IFOAM-EU Group, called for more support for research to put organic agriculture on an even stronger footing. He said that the problem continued to be the attitude of many people. “Filling the tank of an SUV jeep could feed a Palestinian family for a year.” The real revolution in the provision of food called for a complete re-think. As far as the Copenhagen conference was concerned, he saw the danger of organic agriculture being sidelined in favour of grandiose one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately benefit only the agro-chemical industry. “We must work on a sustainable diet for the planet,” said Stopes. (Picture: The managing director of IFOAM EU Group, Marco Schlüter, chaired the opening event at the Permanent Representation of Baden-Württemberg in Brussels)

Mariann Fischer Boel was represented by Julien Mousnier who expressed his support at the beginning of the conference. Taking the guidelines on organic wine and the new EU organic logo as examples, he described the activities of the Commission regarding organic agriculture. 3,400 new drafts had been submitted, and there was now a short list of three. Interested parties could vote on an internet site until the end of January 2010. He said the EU Commission regarded it as important that the climate change discussion should not just deal with mitigating the effects but also with adapting agriculture. “We can learn a lot from organic agriculture, but organic agriculture is a part of the solution and not the whole solution.” Not everybody wanted or could convert to organic agriculture. (Picture: A group of students travelled from the Agricultural University at Stuttgart-Hohenheim to Brussels)

Conclusion: armed with powerful arguments, the representatives of IFOAM should soon be on their way to Copenhagen. Permitted to attend as NGO members, they can try to influence the thinking of their government representatives. Irrespective of the outcome of the negotiations at government level in Copenhagen, the IFOAM EU Conference in Brussels was a complete success whose message may well have fallen on fertile soil for the EU Commission members and other people too.

Since this conference was a place where the European organic industry, members of both the EU Commission and the European parliament, organic companies and other organisations could meet, it would make sense to hold it annually in Brussels. The first conference took place two years ago.
The objective: to exchange ideas and information, to lobby and to promote internal networking.

Tip:
www.organic-congress-ifoameu.org

Climate rules in organic guidelines:
http://www.klimatmarkningen.se/in-english