Page 222 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

Chapter 6

that without an established organic seed market, there will be too little stimu-

lus for investment to breed cultivars better adapted to organic agriculture.

The long term implications of on-going regulatory ambiguity (resulting in too

many options for obtaining derogations for use of conventional seed) is that it

frustrates commercial returns on investment in organic seed production and

limits improvements in the capacities of seed companies to produce high quality

organic seed. The EU has made the most progress (of the three jurisdictions

studied) in moving toward 100% use of organic seed. One can still wonder

whether the deliberate step by step approach that has occurred in the EU (where,

in several member states, derogation options are closing for an increasing number

of crops that already have a suicient diversity of cultivars available in organic

seed form), will be suicient to secure 100% use of organic seed in all member

states. Perhaps a more rigorous approach is needed, to ensure compliance across

all member states, and this may be proposed in the EU in the near future. The

European Commission (EC) recently revisited the overall organic standards and

Der Spiegel, a leading German newspaper, has reported that the EC considers the

number of options for achieving derogations that allow use of conventionally

produced inputs to be a violation of the integrity of the organic sector, and is

about to propose to drop the derogation option (Anonymous, 2014 ).

6.3.2 Organic management systems inluence horticultural and

phytochemical trait performance

An important aspect of developing a full assortment of organically appropriate

cultivars is the question of which cultivars to have in the assortment. To answer

that question one needs to understand how diferent organic management

systems are compared to conventional systems and how cultivars perform in

diferent systems. We irst address whether the trial results in this study were

representative for the organic sector.

Fundamentally, organic agricultural systems are premised on the ecological

functioning of its soils. Under IFOAM principles of organic agriculture this is

expressed in the Principle of Health, referring to the interrelationship of healthy

soils, plants and animals (IFOAM, 2012). According to Ugarte and Wander (2012)

and as observed in our study, soil factors related to organic matter, microbial

activity (abundance and diversity), and potential mineralizable nitrogen are

often higher in farming systems with well managed organically fertilised soils

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