Farm characteristics determine why a large share of organically produced wine is not labelled as organic

Organic agricultural production is increasing globally and is of high policy relevance, particularly in Europe. Various measures incentivize farmers to adopt organic practices, such as direct payments and labelling. We here address a rarely considered aspect of organic production, that not all organ...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lucca Zachmann, Chloe McCallum, Robert Finger
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2024-01-01
Series:Environmental Research Communications
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ad9383
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Organic agricultural production is increasing globally and is of high policy relevance, particularly in Europe. Various measures incentivize farmers to adopt organic practices, such as direct payments and labelling. We here address a rarely considered aspect of organic production, that not all organic producers in Europe opt for organic labelling for their products at the point of sale. We investigate the discrepancy between organic production and labelling in Swiss viticulture. Out of 115 grapevine growers who adhere to organic principles in production, 43.5% do not use organic labelling when marketing their wines. We find that especially farms using alternative labelling strategies (e.g. for fungus-resistant varieties), smaller farms and farms less specialized in viticulture to be more likely to forgo organic labelling. We draw conclusions for policy and science. For example, our findings show that there may be, for some crops, more organic products on shelves than indicated from sales statistics of organically labelled products. The use of statistics that indicate the share of sales of organic products for specific products and food sales at large may thus be misleading.
ISSN:2515-7620