New EU organic regulation: improvements to the control system.

The new EU regulation 392/2013 was recently published, which amends Reg. CE 889/08 with regard to the control system for organic production in order to make important improvements to the control system for organic production. To do this, the Commission has introduced various prescriptions valid for operators but, above all, for public supervisory authorities and control bodies.
The reason for the birth of this regulation must be found in the inspection activity of the European Court of Auditors, which ended with a negative result.
Among the deficiencies found, there is the insufficient supervisory activity on the part of the responsible public authorities and the supervisory authorities of the member States, as well as the supervisory bodies.
In particular, there are deficiencies affecting the capacity of member states to manage the traceability of organic products both within individual States and, even more so, between the various member states, and there is a lack of capacity to manage imports from non-EU countries.
But what is striking is the complaint of the poor use and circulation of information, especially in the case of irregularities and infractions, identified by the Court of Auditors as an important cause of the lower efficiency of the control system.
The Commission, therefore, reacted not only by responding to the Court of Auditors, recognizing the recommendations it made, but also by using regulation 889/08 to improve it by increasing its effectiveness. And it has done so by introducing obligations for public authorities and control bodies for a more effective supervisory and control action respectively, as well as for the management of the information collected.
The main elements identified by the Commission, and which need to be improved, are two: the collection of information from companies, with the creation of a control file, and the exchange of this information between supervisory bodies, between them and the public supervisory authorities and between the same subjects of the different Member States.
But what is changing for companies? In order for it to be possible to oblige public authorities and control bodies to exchange information relating to certified companies, it is necessary to provide for the obligation for companies to consent to this processing. Consequently, the first amendment to Reg. EC 889/08 concerns precisely Article 63, which deals with the commitments that the operator must sign upon entering the control system with the addition of five new obligations for companies, all of them, although declined in different forms, relating to the fact that the operator must accept the exchange of information concerning him directly and indirectly by inserting the new paragraph in art. 63: “[the operator must] agree to inform the competent supervisory authorities or supervisory authorities/bodies of any irregularity or infringement concerning the biological qualification of their product or of the biological products received from other operators or contractors”.
This obligation, in particular, enters heavily into the daily lives of companies because it concerns any irregularity and infringement affecting their own or received products; therefore, the management of all complaints and all internal non-compliances must provide for timely communication to their Control Body. This obligation has never been present in organic legislation.
For operators, in theory, this should already be the case. Even without the need for a regulatory obligation, in fact, it is desirable that the Control Bodies have already provided, in their service contracts, this obligation, as well as the release for the exchange of information. Companies that are not already engaged in this regard through contracts signed with their respective Control Bodies, must become aware that this obligation, which, like all regulatory provisions, will be applied from 1 January 2014, cannot be ignored.
Be that as it may, real news or not for companies, what is certain is that, in general, the Commission with this regulation gives an important 'crackdown' to the control system. It forces public authorities and control bodies to carry out more checks and with more effective tools; imposes more supervision by the public authority over the work of the Control Bodies; requires the Control Bodies to exchange information and to collaborate more with each other and with the public authority; to adopt a minimum sampling plan, for 5% of the controlled operators; to develop more and more risk analysis and to carry out more effective checks, using competent inspection personnel and with a updated training.
All this will have an effect on companies which, it is hoped, will be positive, because if it helps to hit dishonest operators more, it will go in the direction of rewarding the virtuous ones who will thus be able to operate with a few fewer unfair competitors. And again, it may have a positive effect on the perception of trust that both operators and final consumers must maintain in the European control system. (taken and modified from the bioqualita.eu newsletter)
internal note: since the start of our internal control plan in 2009 (and even before), like El Tamiso, we have always maintained extensive transparency in the management of issues related to certified organic products but which had problems with residues or something else. In this sense, our control body has always been promptly notified and the possible resumption of relations with suppliers (both partners and non-members) has always been endorsed by the supplier's control body in such a way as to verify the crossing of controls.
We quickly realized that in this situation (transparency in the dissemination of the results of the checks) there were very few companies in Italy, in fact it seems that many are shocked by the new regulation that only makes communication between companies and entities and between bodies and entities mandatory. It seems to us that something has finally been clarified that was already clear to us.
As always, someone will have a few more problems until they find a way to circumvent even this new rule. And all of us, of course, hope that it will take a long time to do it...