Quality and food safety: paradox or ratio legis for organic products?

Reforming legislation on organic food production, eu shows sensitive to consumers expectations about organic food: tracking and control, methods that respect rhythm of nature and improve maintenance of biodiversity. As a consequence it institutionalizes general objectives on the ec Regulation 834/2007: it establishes a sustainable management system for agriculture that aims at producing products and food of high quality that does not harm environment, human health, plant health or animal health. Generally speaking, looking at food quality and safety, can it be said that eu policy increasingly assigns to organic food such aims of quality and safety of production? With the aim to contribute to the debate on the concept of quality, which in the context of Common legislation lacks legal precision and it is often confused with food safety and hygiene baseline standards, the study highlights the inconsistency of the rules on organic farming. In fact, even if the regulation is strongly inspired by food quality and safety, it admits, like conventional food and feed, adventitious presence of gmos in organic product, its ingredients or feed materials, and so it may reduce ethics contents. Present analysis shows that in the eu strategy for food does not seem to be strictly coherent between horizontal (which takes into account, inter alia, the protection of human health and the environment, and sectoral legislation on gmos) and special legislation orphan of uniform and binding rules on the coexistence between conventional, organic and gm crops, despite the new, more flexible approach of the European Commission. The study focuses on eu recent guidelines that provide for measures to restrict space in organic products gm content to levels below the current thresholds. However, given that specificity of organic products does not affect only farmers’ income but, as the Green Paper on agricultural product quality, also consumers expectations, only a revision of the regulation may offer unique solutions for all the Member States.

Keywords: Organic food products, agri-food safety, agri-food quality, agricultural policy, sustainability

Jel codes: Q18, Q15, K32

Sabrina Giuca, Qualità e sicurezza alimentare: ratio legis o paradosso per i prodotti biologici? in "ECONOMIA AGRO-ALIMENTARE" 2/2010, pp 75-99, DOI: 10.3280/ECAG2010-002006