One year of voluntary service at IFOAM EU has passed for all 5 of us! Our one-year
experience at IFOAM EU helped us to understand how organic agriculture fits into that
idealistic picture and we have decided to write this guide in order to share our findings with
other organic enthusiasts and people who want to learn more.
Do you know where the organic food come from?
If you eat an organic biscuit is means that the butter comes from organically grown cows and the flour from organically farmed wheat. And it is the same for all the other ingredients. So when you eat organic food you are contributing to all the positive features that organic farming delivers: animal welfare, biodiversity, environmental-friendly practices and so on.
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(c) Marie – Chiara Tort
2013 has been an important year for IFOAM EU Group. After the success in 7th Organic Congress in Lithuania, IFOAM EU events team and all IFOAM EU staff had another challenge : To highlight memorable 10th birthday. For this occasion we organised 3 day celebration and conference.
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Unfortunately, “Croatia belongs to the group of rare countries where organic agriculture is underdeveloped”, according to the group of authors from the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Agronomy and the “Marko Marulić” Academy in Knin.
(c) Marie-Chiara Tort
According to the Pilot Project ‘’Organic agriculture in European countries-Training on European standards for Ecological agricultural production – EcoJob – AP’’ organic agriculture in Greece has its roots in the ecological movement at the beginning of the 1980s. The first organic farmers were mostly amateurs who experimented with different organic cultivation methods, e.g. according to Steiner, Fukuoka and others. Continue reading
Spain is the European Union Member State with the most organic land use out of total agricultural land/ hectares of organic land, with a total of 1.621.898 ha (Fibl, 2013). But it hasn´t always been like that. The evolution of the sector has developed over years:
The beginning of organic agriculture (agricultura ecológica in Spanish) comes from the 1970s. During that time, just a few small fields were used for organic farming and were managed by very young farmers. One of the first examples was organic rice production in Murcia.
(c) Marie-Chiara Tort
Today about 4% of the utilised agricultural area (UAA) is cultivated using organic methods and 5% of the farm are organic in France. The number of French organic farmers exceeds 25 000 on the first semester 2013.
In May of 2014 Lithuania will celebrate 10 years in EU. These 10 years was extremely important for organic sector and as for all development in Lithuania in general. Organic land area grew around 9 times, from ~17 000I ha to ~152 000II ha in 9 years.
(c) Francesco Rossetti
In the beginning of autumn, the Organic Five were sent to learn more about organic farming out of first-hand experience. It was about time to say goodbye to sunny summer and accept the rainy reality of Belgium when a Flemish bus took us to the picturesque permaculture farm Plukrijp, located near Schriek to drive us off into an adventure that was about to widen our horizons.
We are the five volunteers that moved from five European Union’s countries to its capital, Brussels, to take part in the European Voluntary Service. Coming from Croatia, France, Greece, Lithuania and Spain to help organic food and farming position itself properly within the EU regulation and to promote the green, eco-friendly and sustainable nature of this agricultural sector.
