Policies supporting organic food and farming in the EU: assessment and development by stakeholders in 11 European countries

Summary

There is no single ‘best way’ of policy development. Bottom-up approaches to policy design and a broad debate among stakeholders facilitate policy learning and innovation. A novel approach of a bottom-up policy design process involving stakeholders is introduced.
The first results obtained by implementing this methodology
are presented. The outcomes of a large international effort for a development of policies for organic food and farming, which took place in Maj 2004 in Europe, are analyzed: the synthesized results from 11 European countries (AT, CH, CZ, DE, DK, EE, GB, HU, IT, PL, SI) on the current situation of policies related to the organic food market in Europe are highlighted and policy recommendations for the development of the organic food and farming sector are formulated.
Specifically, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threatsof policies related to the organic food market are identified and policy instruments used to address these aspects are developed.