BIOFACH’s summer edition: Inspiring sessions and meeting the sector: 26-29 July 2022, Nurimberg, Germany
The most important yearly appointment of the organic movement worldwide, BIOFACH took place again in person on 26-29 July 2022. At the fair, organic operators from across the supply chain, organic association representatives and decisionmakers and many more met, exchanged and learned.
This year, our booth moved to the ‘international hall’ 3A, booth 517, where we met many visitors, old and collaborators and our colleagues from IFOAM’s across the world.
Of course, we contributed to the BIOFACH programme with several sessions zooming in on policy, regulation and research which we organized or spoke at. Our full programme of is available on our website.
Rather than writing a long report, we will share the highlights of each session through the live tweeting we did.
Day 1: Policy day with the Commission, German government and Members of the European Parliament
Day 3: Youth, certification, new GMOs, and carbon farming
We started off day 3 attending an engaging session and a young panel, talking about youth in organic. This session could not come more timely, as we had our first Organics Europe’s Youth Event in Frick, Switzerland 31 August-1 September. If this sounds interesting to you, you can still check out what we learned during the youth event.
Following the youthful session, we had a session, organized by our Interest Group on Organic Certification and Integrity, about the future of organic certification
Together with the audience, we raised many questions about what the future could bring!
We also spoke at a session by BÖLW on new GMOs and their place in organic. Speakers to this session agreed that new GMOs should fall under the existing GMO regulation – as the European Court of Justice ruled in 2018. Later that day, our session on carbon farming tackled many issues related to organic’s potential to mitigate climate change, concrete actions the sector is already taking and an interesting report by Ecovalia showing how organic farming in the Mediterranean outperforms other types of agriculture in its climate resilience (currently only available in Spanish).
Day 4: TP Organics’ Science Day
Before travelling back, we still attended TP Organics’ Science Day to discuss digital technologies for local and small-scale processing. This hands on session showed practical examples of the opportunities digitalisation can offer. For a full report, read more in our newsletter.
Of course, we did not only organise sessions. We also celebrated our 20th birthday, IFOAM – Organics International’s 50th and IFOAM Organics Asia’s’s 10th! Thank you to BIOFACH for wishing us well and to our colleagues at the other IFOAM’s for sharing such nice celebration!
You still have the time to celebrate with us throughout 2022 and to add your voice to the #YearOfOrganics!