The organic food business is booming -- pop into any metropolitan supermarket and you'll find evidence of the public's increasing demand for "natural" foods and a growing mistrust of industrial farming.
Travel across the EU and you'll see a range of similar "organic" labels in similarly bulging food departments.
The vegetables may not look quite as appetizing as their conventionally produced varieties and the meat may appear a little paler but at least it's natural and you know what you're getting, right?
Well, up to a point.
The question is -- has a vegetable bearing the English "organic" label had the same history as one carrying "biologique" in France, "biologisch" in Germany or "ecologico," in Spain?
The answer is "not exactly."
Europe's patchwork of rules leaves the consumer largely in the dark over standards used outside their own country for organic produce.
There are EU rules, designed to harmonize national laws for the single market, and there is even an EU-approved logo, but member states are free to impose their own standards and use their own national labels.
"In principle we support the use of the EU label. Lots of national labels are very confusing for consumers and we want more clarity in this area," said Willemien Bax, deputy director of Europe's consumer organization BEUC.
The EU adopted rules for organic crops in 1991 but struggled for years to develop a code for meat. A final compromise reached in 1999 was a product of negotiations between countries with different outlooks on the organic question.
For example, Germany believed "biologisch" beef could be produced from cattle tethered in a barn. But the British idea was that "organic" beef should come only from free-roaming livestock. The watered-down EU compromise was that animals must have "access to a free-range area."
This is partly due to historical reasons -- there have been three important agricultural movements in the sector. Biodynamic agriculture, an idea developed in Germany, organic farming, which originated in Britain in the 1940s and biological agriculture, developed in Switzerland.
The theories have different emphases, but all distance themselves from an interventionist approach to agriculture and stress an essential link between farming and nature.
Some member states, such as the Netherlands, simply apply the EU rules, although here too there are other labels for strictly "biodynamic" produce.
Italy, which produces some 40 percent of the EU's organic food crop from 1 million hectares, has imposed additional standards on top of the EU rules.
France, too, imposes tighter norms on the size of livestock buildings, the source of livestock feed and veterinary drug treatments allowed.
Organic agriculture is practised in almost all countries of the world and in 1999 global land use was estimated at 15.8 million hectares, according to the European Commission.
The EU had some 3.8 million hectares devoted to organic production, ranking it behind Australia with around 7.5 million, above Latin America with 3.3 million and the US with 1.1 million hectares.
But even here the figures can be misleading. Most of Australia's area is pastoral land for low intensity livestock grazing and thus cannot really be compared to organic land in Denmark, for example, where productivity is much higher.
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