At the 7th meeting of the European Commission‘s "Expert Group on Cross Compliance" Stephanie Schlegel, Fellow at Ecologic, gave a presentation on cross compliance and certification schemes, discussing the potential links and synergies between the two approaches. Her presentation is available for download.
Cross compliance and certification schemes are two approaches to validating whether minimum standards are met by farmers. In recent month there has been growing interest in developing closer links between the two approaches.
The need to look for further synergies between certification schemes and cross compliance, particularly with regard to the risk analysis, was also identified by the EU Commission in its March 2007 report to the Council (COM (2007) 147 final).
The seventh meeting of the "Expert group on Cross Compliance" focussed on the discussion how different Member States plan to link certification schemes and cross compliance.
In this context Stephanie Schlegel gave a presentation on the potential synergies and drawbacks of linking cross compliance and verification schemes. In her presentation she also presented the findings of the FP6 research project "Facilitating the CAP reform: compliance and competitiveness of European agriculture" in which Ecologic is involved.
The presentation of Stephanie Schlegel is available for download [pdf, 168 KB, English].