9, 10 AND 11.05.2008

ORGANIZERS: NGO KRAJINA AND ECOCERT

After negotiation with ECOCERT’s Manager carried out in republic of Serbia, we realized this important event but without major media coverage and only for specific users.

During that 3 days event we joined together all our leading graders for ISO standard 9000:2000 (for quality) and ISO standard 23000:2005 (for food safety). Every grader had a duty to carry out analysis on the area of his/hers Municipality and to find responsible and serious producers interested in education and certification process.

Our Organization notified producers with whom we had previous cooperation and who wish to improve their production and to improve their position on domestic and International organic food market.

First Conference day was dedicated to education and preparation of certification process for leading graders of ISO 22000:2005 standard and ISO 9000:2000 standard. Through this we tried to bring local administration authorities closer to this process, which are already included in the project; “Establishment of Domestic accredited certification house base on EU standards”.

Second conference day was dedicated to the producers and our partners from Republic of Srpska/BIH. It was very encouraging to see 40 producers interested in ECOCERT certificate and their determination to enter into this process according to EC Regulation 2091/92 which completely regulates organic food production, processing and organic food handling.

A significant number of Associations and Collectives were present at the Conference as well and they are interested in certifying their products, especially the beekeepers. The interest for certification is grate and even after the Conference was concluded producers were coming to our Organization asking for some additional information and possibility of their inclusion into this program.

For future period, in cooperation with our partner – ECOCERT, we plan to provide service for all interested producers in sense of education, later on inspection and other necessary activities prior to certificate issuing.

On the third Conference day we presented new standards for this Program and specifics related to the organic products market. Special attention was given to the presentation of ISO standard 14000:2000 for ecology and examples how this standard is applied.

At the end we presented the “Cattle Breeding” program, because we believe that local authority employees can significantly contribute to cattle production, but to encourage other activities related to rural development, introduction of International standards in agricultural production as well.

MIRELA ZRNIĆ, graduated engineer of Agriculture