Reporter: Are you sure it's organic?
2,167 views · Published 12 November 2012 · 4:57 · Indexed 8 November 2026
Channel: European Parliament · 2012 · News & Politics
In spite of the crisis, the organic market is still growing in Europe. The reform of the CAP post-2013 aims to guarantee Europeans healthy, good-quality food that respects the environment. What is the place of organic produce? We should widen greening and make it an optional menu. I think it's a shame and that we must reintroduce crop rotation in the CAP greening debate. Aid must be granted to farmers, but ecologically. Jean-François Noel is proud of his business. He's in charge of a cooperative of 27 producers of organic poultry in Belgium. On this farm, no less than 4,800 organic chickens are reared. But what is an organic chicken? We have to respect European standards which specify a density inside the chicken shed of 10 chickens per square metre. They also specify an outdoor area of at least four square metres per chicken. So for the 4,800 chickens we have inside here, which is the maximum number per shed as well as the density per square metre, we have two hectares of outdoor area. In addition, the feed obviously has to be organic. The farm is relatively small. It's a long way from industrial chicken sheds containing up to 40,000 animals. But if the rosy picture the consumer has of organic produce is dented, Jean-François is keen to set the record straight. It's not possible to live by rearing 200 chickens on your own, even if you sell them yourself. It's not possible because there are no economies of scale. Regulations no longer contain links to the soil, to the dismay of purists. Farmers used to be obliged to produce at least 40% of chicken feed, but from 2009 new regulations changed the situation. Producers can buy in their poultry feed from outside the farm, even from outside the Union, on condition that it's organic. We have here wheat, maize, peas, horse beans, a little soya. For what we can't find here, we have agreements with an Italian cooperative. We work directly with a cooperative that we know and I think that's also a plus for the quality of our products. We're not opportunistic. We don't look for the cheapest raw materials. We look for quality raw materials. Certification throughout the production chain is crucial to be sure of the organic quality of products put on sale. We join Geert Bleuzé at another farm. He's an inspector for a certification body. He goes through the purchase orders for the raw materials present on the farm. If we have doubts about this animal feed, we can always take a sample. We can take as many samples as we want. We send a sample to the laboratory, and they can see in a very rational, scientific way if there are any pesticides, fungicides or other products which are not allowed in organic agriculture. But certain scandals have highlighted the poor controls in some EU countries. In 2011 the Italian police broke up a ring supplying fake organic products for a value in excess of 220 million euros. How can the consumer follow all this? Does the new European label introduced in July 2010 guarantee something as 100% organic? The answer is no. The EU label applies to food products containing at least 95% of ingredients from organic agriculture. It also allows the accidental presence of GMOs up to 0.9%. Consumers are often unaware of these points. In Paris we meet Claude Gruffat, a longtime player in organics in France. He thinks the EU label needs to evolve and take into account environmental or even social aspects, such as workers' welfare, as other labels already do. What didn't you like in this legislation? What we didn't like, for example, was to do with the link to the soil. The production of raw materials for animal feed had disappeared off the map. We thought that was an important thing to keep. There are questions about the surface area of buildings for animals which were modified, often lowering them rather than raising them. There's stuff about times of production in the year, which doesn't connect with important questions for us, like seasonality. As for Jean-François, our farming cooperative head, he hopes to be able to diversify his activity. He wants to go into production of turkeys for Christmas and the New Year. They will, of course, be organic. EuroparlTV video ID: 2b9b79ef-3bff-4e19-bf4f-a1040093592d
