Organic farming has worldwide experienced a continuous growth in the last decade. At the same time, supply-chain processes have become more complex, diversified and are increasingly organized globally. Against this background, detailed economic and technical information on organic production, processing and trade is needed at a global scale to understand the impact of major driving forces on organic farming and to provide relevant information for all actors who want to strengthen their position in a global agricultural economy. Currently, such information is rare.
For this reason, the Germany-based state research Institute of Farm Economics at the Thünen Institute and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL, Switzerland) have started to build up the organic expert network agri benchmark as part of the existing agri benchmark project (see www.agribenchmark.org). The agri benchmark Organic Network aims at establishing an international cooperation between scientists, advisors and farmers to compare and share information about typical organic farms with respect to production and production systems, ecological parameters, production costs, competitiveness and future development.
To disseminate the idea of the network, we would like to invite interested experts (organic policy and sector experts, organic farm economists, etc.) to a pre-conference of the 18th IFOAM Organic World Congress in Istanbul, to take place in October this year.
Venue: Yeditepe University in Istanbul.
Date: Sunday, 12. October 2014, 9.00 to 12.30
The pre-conference aims to inform participants about the agri benchmark project, to present and discuss first results from selected countries and to provide a platform for officially founding agri benchmark Organic Network.
The programme of the pre-conference will consist of presentations and discussions on
- 9.00 - 9:30 Welcome, Introduction of participants
Helga Willer - 9.30 - 10.00 Introduction to the agribenchmark network
Jürn Sanders - 10.00 - 10.30 First results of farm comparisons in selected countries
Sanna Heinze, Susanne von Münchhausen - 10.30 - 10:45 Coffee break
- 10.45 – 11.15 The collection and comparison of agri-environmental farm data and the methodology to compare organic farms worldwide
Matthias Stolze - 11.15 - 12.30 Building a global network: Methodology, networking and communication infrastucture, next steps
If you are interested to receive more information, please contact Matthias Stolze, FiBL