Organic industry calls for EU organic action plan

With looks of satisfaction on the faces of participants, the seventh European Organic Congress – organized in Vilnius by the IFOAM EU Group and the Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture - came to an end. The reason for holding the conference in the capital was Lithuania taking over the presidency of the EU Council. To coincide with Lithuania taking on its new role, many participants arrived on 1.7.2013 to take part in an excursion to organic farmers in the region. The organizers were very pleased to see that a good 200 people had come from around 28 countries to attend the conference on 3 and 4 July.

(Picture: More than 200 specialists and speakers attended the Organic Congress in Vilnius)   

The congress was organized by the IFOAM EU Group in conjunction with the Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture. Both were supported by the Lithuanian organic farmers association LEUA and the country’s Chamber of Agriculture. With the title “Shaping Europe’s Organic Future Together”, the issues under discussion were the development of the European Organic Regulation and the demand for an organic action plan in order to give the organic industry a further stimulus to growth. The explicit aim of the one-and-a-half-day event was not only discussion within the organic sector with representatives from the different countries but also the provision of sufficient opportunities for talking to the representatives of the EU Commission. The Commission was represented by four important people in Vilnius: Alina Ujupan, a member of Commissioner for Agriculture Dacian Ciolos cabinet, João Onofre, Head of the Organic Unit at the Directorate General for Agriculture (DG AGRI), Bernd Winkler (DG SANCO) and Linda Mauperon, Internal Policy and Regulation Coordinator in the Organic Unit of DG Agri. At the opening and closing panels, the Lithuanian Vice Minister of Agriculture Rytis Šatkauskas and senior staff from his ministry were also in attendance. They emphasized the importance of organic agriculture for Lithuania and the Baltic region as a whole.

The conference was divided into twelve plenary meetings and working groups on the various sub-topics such as the amendment to the current organic control and the measures for an organic action plan. The first speaker representing Commissioner Ciolos was Mrs Ujupan (picture) who presented the standpoints of the EU Commission. She went into the current resolutions affecting agricultural policy in the years ahead. “Organic agriculture can come in pillar 1 within the 30% financing of small and medium farms (the small farmer scheme).” However, she pointed out that pillar 2 of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provided far more possibilities. “We’re hoping this will bring a lot of organic innovations,” said Ujupan (picture on right). She said that the online survey arranged by the Commission in the spring of 2013, in which 45,000 people took part, had been very successful. On the one hand, the organic sector was a great success and, on the other, many people had asked what was to be done to continue the growth process. The European Court of Auditors had produced a very tough auditor report. “Cases of fraud have created uncertainty in the industry and in the Commission as well,” explained Ujupan, who works closely with Dacian Cioloº. She said the question that all should be asking themselves is how to improve the integrity of both the European industry’s own products and those that are imported.She concluded by stating: “We want to see a strong and successful organic sector.”
 

Christopher Stopes (picture), the President of the IFOAM EU Group, called for all countries to follow the example of those who were most advanced in terms of organic practice. With reference to EU agricultural policy, he said that there could only be public money for things that benefited the public - public money for public goods. Conventional agriculture must not receive funds if it doesn’t make a recognizable contribution to protection of the countryside and maintaining the environment. However, the achievements of organic agriculture had to be presented much more clearly than has been the case so far. Amending the organic control procedures must be approached with extreme caution. “It must be clear that controls are a procedure that is carried out in strict compliance with the organic directives and that the organic movement is a values-oriented movement that is committed to ecological principles.”

A number of statements from organic stakeholders made it abundantly clear that the plan of the Commission to transfer a large part of organic control to the remit of the Directorate General for Health and Consumers (DG SANCO) faced serious criticism. It is feared that in future an organic product could be assessed mainly by the absence of residues, which can be established by chemical analysis. However, the industry insists that the process for producing a food item must continue to be examined in its entirety and that it complies with the criteria of organic agriculture. The attendees were in agreement that organic control must represent risk-oriented control. Highly concentrated organic control should take place where the risk is highest – for example, in large-scale livestock farming.
 

Bavo van den Idsert (on the left in the picture, next to Antje Kölling/IFOAM EU and João Onofre/EU COMM.), from the Dutch umbrella organization Bionext and also a member of the board of the IFOAM EU Group, regards residue analysis as only one of several parameters. He said that fraud had to be tackled with a variety of measures. He wanted to see in the revision of the Organic Regulation – the Commission is expected to produce a draft at the beginning of 2014 – new regulations for poultry keeping and greenhouses. “The guidelines have to become more reactive,” he asserted, so that people could respond more quickly to new requirements.
 

Given the need to improve organic control, the IFOAM President Andre Leu (picture) from  Australia emphasised that the interests of small farmers across the world must not be forgotten and that they must not be marginalised by over-regulation. He said that the efforts to reduce trade barriers in the organic sector through the GOMA initiative – the mutual recognition of directives - were promising. Another initiative was the participatory guarantee system (PGS), which is already being used widely in India and China.
 

Andrea Ferrante, from the Italian organic association AIAB, supported the call for an organic action plan with the words: “If we want great agriculture with lots of biodiversity, we need to have organic agriculture. Who’s got such lovely hedges as us?” He sees some progress in  the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), because organic land management is regarded as “green by definition”. But nevertheless some framework conditions for the organic sector need improvement,
and he gave the examples of collecting reliable data on organic production and the organic market and setting up a Europe-wide protein strategy for animal feed.
 

An organic action plan for the whole of Europe, that has been demanded by the EU IFOAM Group since 2010 (see the detailed IFOAM EU document), was the topic addressed by one of the working groups. Juern Sanders from the Thünen Institute presented the experience of organic action plans in various European countries. Paul Moore, the chair of the Organic Trade Board (OTB) in Britain, explained the successful action taken to convert the British organic market from negative growth to positive growth. After years of a shrinking market, organic sales in the UK have been rising over the last three months, which he attributed to the targeted measures of the OTB. The conference did not go into much detail regarding individual points that should be included in a European action plan, such as intensifying the use of organics in public institutions or marketing programmes. (Picture: On the first day of the conference, an attractive organic market was set up in front of the Town Hall in Vilnius)
 

João Onofre, Head of the Organic Unit at DG AGRI, stated at the end of the congress: “We’ve got the message. We’ll take away a number of new ideas. Basically, the sector wants stability and an organic action plan.” In his view, the reorganization in organic control was not something to worry about. “We must work together to ensure that the revision of the EU Organic Regulation is a success. The aim of the EU Commission with the revision is the creation of a simpler and clearer framework that puts in place the preconditions for growth of the organic industry in the next ten years.” (Picture: Jeva Stragyte sells organic vegetables three times a week at markets in Vilnius)
 

In his concluding statement, Thomas Fertl (Bio-Austria) said that an organic action plan was a powerful signal to the industry that organic agriculture is continuing to be developed. IFOAM EU President Christopher Stopes: “Regarding the new EU agriculture market policy and the current revision of the organic directives, the seventh European Organic Congress has produced clear results relating to the development of the organic sector that stress the importance of the organic principles and analyse in detail themes like growth, credibility and organic regulation.” The unanimous demand for a new European Organic Action Plan would improve the political parameters for further development of organic agriculture and at the same time meet the expectations of consumers.
(Picture: Exhibition by Erkki and Maria Pöytäniemi from Finland with their new book “Tales of Organics in Finland” in the foyer to the conference hall)

Tip: http://www.organic-congress-ifoameu.org

Many of the presentations are available under "Programme"

Organic action plan and policy for organic agriculture:

http://eu.ifoam.org/en/library/dossiers

http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/external-studies/organic-farming-support_en.htm