Checklist’s compliance with other standards for organic/sustainable agriculture

Summary

This work is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, widely-calibrated checklist for EU sustainable landscape management, which is intended to serve both as an analytical tool of reference as well as a design tool for local, regional and European policy making on sustainable developments.
The tool has been developed out of a multidisciplinary study in EU countries which was designed to find out what would be the overall requirements for a sustainable management of the landscape of rural areas. Could these stipulations be brought together in a comprehensive system with sufficient consistency to comply with the notion that the landscape is an entity, which should be managed accordingly? Cooperation of the scientific experts with those involved in the practical side, and alternating plenary reporting with subgroup visits to farms in the rural landscapes of the participants' countries, allowed for the development of some truly interdisciplinary teamwork. Organic agriculture has been included to find out how organic agriculture contributes to the rural landscape.
Checklist’s compliance with other standards for organic/sustainable agriculture present an attempt to check the conformity of the standards for the development of sustainable landscapes developed in this publication with some other standards for organic and sustainable agriculture:
1. IFOAM = (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements): Basic Standards for Organic Agriculture and Processing and Guidelines for Coffee, Cocoa and Tea; Evaluation of Inputs decided by the IFOAM General Assembly at Copenha¬gen/Denmark, August 1996.
2. EU = Official Journal of the European Communities: Council Regulation (EEC) No. 2092/91 of June 24 1991 on organic production of agricultural products and indications referring thereto on agricultural products and foodstuffs.
3. Vereijken, Kabourakis refer to the standards developed within the research network on integrated and ecological arable farming systems for EU and associated countries (Concerted Action AIR 3-CT920755), of which some are presented in the corresponding chapters in this book)