Opening Organic Trade

Thursday Feb 16th, 2012 21 Views Line on Agriculture

Opening Organic Trade. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Deputy Ag Secretary Kathleen Merrigan is in Germany for the 2012 BioFach World Organic Fair, the largest trade show for organic products in the world. Yesterday she made a rather significant announcement.

MERRIGAN: I was here with Ambassador Isi Siddiqui, our U.S. Trade Representative along with the Commissioner of the EU and we jointly signed an agreement, a trade agreement that will beginning June 1st of this year have open trade between U.S. organic products and the EU organic products. So it’s going to be a great boost to our industry

Merrigan said there was a lot of excitement at the show regarding the agreement signing and it would open a lot of doors.

MERRIGAN: A lot of excitement, a lot of recognition of the opportunity to invite more farmers into organic agriculture, more ranchers into organic agriculture, more small businesses into organic agriculture. We know particularly for the small scale operations trying to get into the EU market has been difficult. It’s double fees for certification. It’s a lot more paperwork. It duplicative in many, many ways.

A lot of time and effort by teams of workers has gone into this agreement.

MERRIGAN: Looking at our standards and looking at our system of enforcing those standards to make sure those standards are being met to see if there really was common ground between the EU and the U.S. and what we found was, absolutely. And our agreement that we signed today says that our programs in terms of the certification and how we enforce along with the standards themselves are essentially equivalent.

Miles McEvoy, National Organic Program Manager echoes Merrigan’s excitement.

McEVOY: I just came from the Netherlands and a lot of excitement about the drop in the double certification and all the extra hurdles that people have to go through to get products into either market so this is really going to open things up.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.