Research in Organic Food and Farming. Reports on organisation and conduction of research programmes in 11 European countries

Summary

This publication represents reports on the organization and conduction of research programmes in 11 European countries involved in the ERA-NET/1/CA-SSA-B No 011716 ”CORE Organic” (Coordination of European Transnational Research in Organic Food and Farming, Project no 011716). This publication evolved as a comprehensive project output but it is not a deliverable as such.
Due to the genesis of research in Organic Food & Farming the present scientific resources in Europe are still scattered. A cross-border aggregation of these resources will help to reach a higher relevance of organic agriculture and a fortifi cation of the involved benefi ts for rural development, environment and consumers.
These benefits are more and more acknowledged by policy makers and governments. Therefore, in several European countries publicly funded research programmes regarding Organic Food & Farming were set up. The existence of these national programmes provides a goood opportunity to manage the aggregation of scientific resources as mentioned above: Within the project CORE Organic (“Coordination of European Transnational Research in Organic Food and Farming”) decision makers and research managers from different European ministries, funding bodies andc other programme operating organisations work together for an increased exchange of information, for a coordination of existing research and integration of knowledge, for sharing and developing best practice to evaluate organic research and for the identifi cation and coordination of common research needs.
The CORE project is running within the European Commissions ERA-NET Scheme, which intends to step up such cooperations between national research activities. Participating countries are Austria, Denmark (coordination), Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Initially, the initiative comprises these eleven countries, but it is open to include all European countries with a national research programme for research in Organic Food & Farming.
This book is a summary of eleven country reports and developed as an additional project output to the mapping of existing information about programmes, institutions, projects and facilities within the fi eld of Organic Food & Farming research in the CORE Organic partner countries. During the organisational period of the mapping for the enlarged database Organic Eprints the project consortium realised the limited resources available for this task. Therefore, it was decided to gather the most important data about organic research in a condensed form in individual country reports.
All country reports in this publication follow a standardised structure starting with the history of organic farming research. Then the organisational structure or research set up is explained followed by financial details about the different research programmes existing in this field. Furthermore the country reports give an overview about existing national research facilities and describe the national procedures for initiation of research and stakeholder engagement, selection criteria and evaluation procedures. The reports end with the explanation of utilisation of research findings and national scientific education and research schools.
After finalising the individual country reports it was a challenge to make this first comprehensive European overview about the status quo of research in organic food and farming available as a publication.
The individual country reports were finished between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006.