The European Commission’s Directorate General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI) published a new roadmap on quality schemes. The roadmap’s purpose is to assess how effective, efficient, relevant and consistent quality schemes are regarding the protection of food and agricultural products.
Within its agricultural quality policy, the European Union protects different products thanks to quality schemes. These schemes aim at protecting specific origins, manufacture processes and traditional know-how of the following products: foodstuffs, spirit drinks, wines and aromatised wines, and their use is regulated under four corresponding EU legislative acts.
As presented in the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre policy report from 2013 “Labelling of agricultural and food products of mountain farming”, about one third of PDO and PGI products registered are fully or significantly located in mountain areas, conducting to a higher concentration of these products in mountain territories than in lowlands. Thus, mountain farming deserved to be mentioned in the feedbacks, to highlight the contributions of GIs to the promotion of mountain products but also to point out limits and issues linked to these quality schemes.
The deadline to contribute is May 27, 2019. For more information on the consultation process and guidance on participation, please see our article (for members only).
10 May 2019
