Congress programme
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Opening session with intro into the discussion and pitches from our sector
Break
New EU Organic Regulation
Announced at the end of 2011, after a long and challenging process of revision, the new EU Organic Regulation (EU) 2018/848 was published in June 2018.
Since then, the Commission and the Member States have been developing the secondary legislation, that is 15-18 additional legal acts which will integrate the text published in 2018. The new EU Organic Regulation will apply from 1 January 2021, even if there are currently proposals to postpone such date to 1 January 2022. This session aims at informing the organic movement sector and the actors of the control system about the main regulatory changes expected.
Session on Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and From Farm To Fork session
The new CAP is characterised by a ‘New Delivery Model’, which should balance environmental ambitions with a flexible and robust results-based framework. It will move to a decentralised system that gives more power to countries and regions to design their measures according to their specific needs. Moreover, new instruments such as eco-schemes in the first pillar could create incentives for farmers deliver public goods. At the same time, budget of the second pillar (on rural development) could be severely cut, which probably have an impact on conversion and maintenance aids.
The ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy for sustainable food is looking at how the agri-food sector can improve the sustainability of food production across the food chain, including through organic production and organic public procurement. One of the promising elements of the Farm to Fork Strategy is an ambitious target for increasing organic land by 2030.
The objective of this session is to discuss the possible interactions between current CAP negotiations, and especially the Strategic Plans Regulations, and the ambitions of the Farm to Fork Strategy? How to ensure that the new CAP will reflect the ambitions of the European Green Deal?
Break
Organic Action Plan
In October 2019, the European Commission pledged to submit a European Action plan to promote organic farming that would contribute to a more sustainable EU food system. The objective of this session is to identify what worked in the current organic action plan, what did not, and, in the light of this, to identify what is needed for the next organic action plan. Also, this session will look into best practices at the level of national organic action plans and see how this knowledge can feed into the next European organic action plan.
Closing debate on European agriculture in a post-COVID-19 world
The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the crucial role that farmers, farm workers, processors, retailers and food workers play to deliver essential goods to people, and the need to better value these actions. It also highlights the fragility of our current food system, deeply interconnected at the international level. Long production chains are highly vulnerable to travel and transport restrictions and to fluctuations in markets. This vulnerability to pandemics and lockdowns adds to the vulnerability of our food system to climate change. It is time to collectively discuss how to make our food production more resilient, through diversity and agroecology, and better rooted at the local level through shorter supply chains. We should also discuss how to lessen the impact of food production on biodiversity and habitats destruction, and how to make intensive livestock production less susceptible to contribute to new zoonoses. This session aims to discuss what lessons we should learn from the virus, how European agriculture should evolve after the crisis and what policy-makers could do to build a more sustainable and more resilient European food system.
