CerOrganic Scope

Organic Agriculture (OA) as a rural development strategy addresses the need for sustainable growth while meeting consumer demand for increased food quality and safety. EC policy encourages the development of OA with the European Action Plan for Organic Food and Farming, which is applied nationally through efforts to increase land area in OA.

The European Council of Young Farmers found training to be a ‘very important instrument’ to adopting the European Model of agriculture. Many EU countries have OA training initiatives, but of unknown quality and effectiveness. The overall aim of CerOrganic is to develop and test a quality assurance procedure for the vocational education/training of agricultural advisors/trainers, based on the European Quality Assurance Reference Framework (EQARF). By incorporating existing OA trainings for young and / or unemployed agricultural experts into an innovative quality-certified training program and developing a quality certification system (for application to other OA training programs), CerOrganic aims to enhance the quality and attractiveness of all OA training systems.