Introduction Organic food is a fast growing market in the EU because of trust of consumers in high quality products that are good for environment, climate, health, transparency and fairness.
There is a huge opportunity for organic to become mainstream the coming decades. But there are also threats. The organic sector faces an increasing pressure on residue contaminations that threatens the success of organic.
The residue findings in organic have different back-ground causes, varying from massive use of wide-spread chemicals in conventional agriculture to active fraud cases, from continuous development of analytical methods which show contaminations of very low levels (below 1 particle per billion) to allowed conventional inputs on organic farms.
For the sake of consumer-trust and further growth of organic agriculture in the EU it is essential to strengthen the quality assurance practices in organic.
This is a task on every level of the chain: farmers, suppliers, processors, control bodies, certifiers, national authorities and the EU Commission.