Bioacademy 2002
26th - 28th JUNE, 2002
The main topics of Bioacademy 2002 were primarily the market with organic products, the production of organic milk and biodiversity. As has become a tradition, the Academy took place on the premises of the Faculty of Horticulture of Mendel University of Agriculture and Forrestry (MUAF) and was organized by the Ernte and PRO-BIO Associations and the Czech and Austrian Ministries of Agriculture. While in recent years the Czech farmers have gathered enough experience with the keeping of meat cattle, the keeping of milch cows in the conditions of ecological farming is still rare enough. Therefore, we welcomed the presence of veterinary doctors as well as practising farmers from Austria, Germany and Slovakia.
We have made an old discovery: to produce organic products and foodstuffs is not very difficult but it is not always easy to sell these products at adequate prices. For this reason, representatives of Austrian, German and Czech sales companies specializing in organic products exchanged their experience in the field (these discussions took place within Group 2). Together, they were looking for answers to various questions, such as what can be done to prevent international trade from damaging ecological farmers and how to make it help develop ecological agriculture instead.
What is the significance of the variety of life for its sustainability on Earth? What do ecological farmers do to keep and expand biodiversity? And what could they do? In what way are they helped in their efforts for sustaining biodiversity by the EU common agricultural policy? Such were the topics discussed in Group 3, with experts from the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany participating.
After Milan Rajnoch, Dean of the Faculty of Horticulture of MUAF, said a few words of welcome, a speech was delivered by Michael Piatti, one of the initiators of the Bioacademy, who runs ecological farms both in Austria and South Moravia. Michael Piatti reminded the audience of the recent scandal with nitrofen in Germany and pointed out that in spite of that, the main advantage of ecological agriculture is the quality and safety of foodstuffs, which are achieved by controlling the whole production process, not by subsequent analysing of the end products. “Even after the nitrofen scandal we shouldn’t give up the system of inspections,” said Piatti. He also stressed the necessity of the ecological system of production being transparent – beginning with the seed and ending with the product sold in the shops.
Reinhard Mang , a deputy of the Austrian Minister of Agriculture, depicted the situtation in ecological farming in Austria and discussed the problems related to the integration of the candidate countries into the EU precisely with regard to agriculture.
Rudolf Trebatický , the head of the Department of Rural Development and Environment of the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture, talked about the situation in Slovakia.
Alfons Piatti , the Austrian ecological farmer, declared that ecological farming is not merely a better version of conventional agriculture but a radically different concept, and therefore it cannot only be considered one of the sectors of the agrarian policy, let alone a peripheral one. “Ecological agriculture must be considered an agrarian/political alternative and not a mere peripheral sphere of agriculture.”
Bernward Geier , the director of IFOAM, the international association of ecological farmers, discussed globalization and regionalism as its opposite. IFOAM associates 750 ecological organization from 105 countries; however, it is not a global organization but an international one. Nevertheless, Geier pointed out: “I’m not opposed to globalization when it concerns fair international exchange of information and goods. Our criticism is not turned against globalization but the undemocratic methods of international organizations who put the GMOs into practice if people want it or not.” Geier went on to present a number of solutions to the present problems offered by ecological agriculture – beginning with regionality through closed sales routes to the pricing of the products, which should make it possible for money to be earned “not on agriculture, but in agriculture”.
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