100 Does certification alone make a company good green organic No certification alone can t do that When company own ers decide to offer consumers organic products then they have to also understand that these are not only different consumers but also different products and that you also have to be responsible for the cultivation yourself That you aren t allowed to use the same mechanisms that are unfortunately otherwise all too common in business like price pressure So often a lot of things have to change in the ethics of your own mission of your company And of course it is also when we look at agriculture first and foremost a question of knowledge and of advising It sounds so absurd to say that they have to want it Be cause you can t be required to want something He laughs They have to consciously follow the process At the end of the day they have to know why it is done Where do you think that the future of certification is headed Well if we keep moving towards giving these residues un due weight or even name them as the only or final deci sion making criterion then we actually won t need certi fiers anymore The laboratory will decide what is organic and what is not But this is exactly where we were in the seventies before the EU organic regulations were passed Organics are a promise to the consumer which has to be kept But they have to be assessed according the right criteria For example it is a further mistake when nat ural substances that have always been present are now sometimes declared to be contaminants in plants which then disqualifies organic products That s complete non sense in my book Do you mean plant compounds like pyrrolizidine alkaloids Yes that s one example Soil borne substances certain natural substances that are just there that have always been there Nowadays where people can and want to measure them they are no longer regarded as natural substances but as contaminants Although it s no one s fault that they are there If it crossed over the line of being dangerous to people s health of course clear correct It s what we should have been doing all along If something is poisonous it s poisonous But if it s just about trace amounts that are simply showing up now because we are able to measure them when we are no longer talking about milligrams per kilogram but of my µ that is of zero point zero zero anything then it sim ply becomes absurd We could just go ahead and ban the air we breathe Back then what was your main argu ment in favour of organic farming What was it supposed to be about My main arguments in favour of organic farming were and still are First this is a form of agriculture that avoids any risk to health that tries to avoid everything that is sprayed onto products and fertilisers overfer tilisation nitrates for the sake of both plants and an imals and for the soil and the water and the air And then you have this very close connection to the envi ronment to the environmental policy advantages The foresters talk about the beneficial effects of the forest And the organic farmers should talk about the benefi cial effects of organic agriculture for society Because this is the first point for me this overall effect soil wa ter air flora fauna everything benefits from this form of agriculture And last but not least and this is the second point human beings We have talked a lot about the consum er But the person who is first exposed to that stuff all those chemicals is always the farmer no matter where you are in the world Organics are a promise to the consumer which has to be kept 5 Quality has roots

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