Legal future of European organic farming unclear

While the organic farming sector is growing fast worldwide, the expected revision of EU legislation concerning production, processing, labelling and monitoring of organic products could not be agreed on in December 2016.

Since 2014 the EU Commission, EU Parliament and EU Agricultural Council negotiated over a draft of new legal rules presented by the EU Commission. The proposed legislation was intended to protect consumers from deception regarding organic products and to prevent unfair competition in the organic sector. But many EU member states as well as the European Parliament regarded the new draft legislation as a setback for the European organic sector, which led to disagreements and to the failure of the trialogue in December 2016.

In sum the draft included the following proposals:

• Simplification and harmonisation of production rules and elimination of exceptions
• Elimination of exemption possibilities for certain types of retailers
• Elimination of the requirement for mandatory annual verification of compliance of all operators
• Group certification system for small-scale farmers in the European Union
• No monitoring by different control authorities for the same groups of products across different stages of the organic chain
• Integration of monitoring-related provisions into a single legislative text
• Specific provisions increasing transparency with regard to monitoring fees
• Throughout the EU, the same measures for the same categories of non-compliance
• No marketing of products as organic if these are unintentionally contaminated with non-authorised substances (e.g., from conventional agriculture)

One of the most controversial points was the automatic de-certification of organic commodities exceeding the allowed limit values of pesticide residues. If pesticides detected are more than twice the limit value for pesticide residues, the respective organic commodity should automatically lose its organic status. In this regard the speaker of The Greens/European Free Alliance at the European Parliament, said: “Organic farmers should not be held responsible if their products are contaminated by pesticide deposits originating from conventional agriculture.”[Martin Häusling, Press Release 08.12.2016]. Rather, critics of the EU Commission´s proposal prefer the further development of the existing EU legislation.

However, the European Commissioner for Agriculture does not intend to withdraw his draft legislation, which could formally stop the legislative process. Technical negotiations on the EU legislation governing organic farming will commence again in January 2017. Yet the future of the legal basis of organic farming in Europe remains unclear.

Detailed information on the legislation process concerning organic farming you find here

For more information please contact

Johanna Schott