Comparative Overview on Legislative Measures in Ecological Farming

摘要

Ecological farm is a modern way of cultivating plants, feeding animals and producing food by using those products and technologies which highly respect the laws of nature - therefore, fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, stimulators and growth regulators, hormones, antibiotics and intensive growth systems are not used. Thus ecological farming essentially differs from traditional farming and must observe strict production rules, set up by legislative norms and, in order to guarantee the observance of such rules to the consumers and the possibility of tracing the product in all its production chain, a rigorous check must be performed, followed by the certification of the production. The European Union has set up rules from 1991 regarding ecological farming, but national legislative measures have sometimes preceded the adoption of European regulations, either because that country was not part of the European Union yet (the Czech Republic, Romania) or because there were previous concerns regarding the practice of biological farming (France).