Draft Criteria for Evaluation of Plant Protection Products, Fertilizers and Soil Conditioners Used in Organic Agriculture

Summary

This volume contains documents which were prepared in the course of the workshop “Draft Criteria for Evaluation of Plant Protection Products, Fertilizers and Soil Conditioners Used in Organic Agriculture”, held in Rome on September 23-24, 2004. This workshop was part of the European Union (EU) Concerted Action project ‘ORGANIC INPUTS EVALUATION’ (QLK5-CT- 2002-02565). For more information on this project see the last page of this volume or visit the project website www.organicinputs.org.
Prior to the workshop, a working group prepared two criteria matrices (hereafter called ‘matrix A’ and ‘matrix B’, and the participants tried out both matrices and reported their experience in a questionnaire. Because the emphasis is on testing the matrices, these results are presented here in anonymous form (‘eval 1’, ‘eval 2’ etc.). During the workshop, a revised matrix was developed(hereafter called ‘matrix C’). Matrix C will serve as a basis for the future work in this project, and will be further developed by the working groups. For the latest information, please visit the project website www.organicinputs.org, or consult the project co-ordinator (via the project
website).
This volume aims at illustrating the state-of-the-art of the project for the workshop mentioned above. At present, all of the matrices are work in progress, and represent notes on further directions of the work, rather than final statements. It goes without saying that they need scientific improvements as well as editorial corrections. However, this will be part of the future work in the project, and was therefore not attempted when editing this volume.