SAFO News, april 2004

Dear subscribers for the SAFO Newsletter,

Second workshop took place in late March – abstracts enclosed

The second workshop of the SAFO Network took place in Witzenhausen late March. You can find the abstracts from this workshop by following this link. The proceedings are in progress, and both the abstract collection and the proceedings will be available from the website.

6 annual Newsletters

We have committed ourselves to 6 annual Newsletters for you as subscribers at the News list, and the amount of Newsletters will increase because of a more and more active network. We expect that we at least will have reached 18 Newsletter in the whole project period! The Newsletter will now automatically be sent to all partners and to all the people on our contact list (both subscribers and the people, whom we have approached based on inputs from the partners, see below about the stakeholder list). We aim to keep the newsletters quite short – approximately 1 page - and leave up to the readers to search for themselves at our website for additional information.

List of stakeholder organisations and contact persons increasing dramatically these weeks

The list of stakeholder organisations are expanding dramatically these weeks, based on inputs from the partners in different countries, and all stakeholders will have these SAFO Newsletters.

Three discussion lists are being made

Three discussion lists are being made these days, and are working from today:

Organic Livestock Systems
This discussion list focuses on development of organic livestock systems under diverse conditions. Exchange of experience on organic animal husbandry systems, grassland systems, in mediterranian countries, candidate countries, mountain areas or any other of the many different systems in Europe.

Animal health and Food Safety
Focus on the combination of animal health issues and food quality and safety issues

Standard Development
Standard development in member as well as candidate countries and new member states.

Partners are automatically included, but all other have to actively sign up for participating in the debate. Please, follow the instructions at the individual pages.

Invitation to the 3rd workshop in Poland in September 2004

An invitation to our 3rd workshop titled ‘Enhancing animal health security and food safety in organic livestock production systems’ is announced. Please notice that you are encouraged to suggest papers until the 10^th of May.

What else on the website since last Newsletter?

We have uploaded the translated summaries from the first workshop on the website, so that a 4 page summary can be found in most of the languages of the partner countries.

The Network has been presented at the British Grassland Society’s conference in Newport the 20th-22nd April, and paper as well as poster and pamphlet is being up-loaded at our website.

Finally, the newest versions of the EU regulations: ‘Consolidated TEXT, produced by the CONSLEG system of the Office for Official Publications if the European Communities’ (93pp; CONSLEG: 1991r2092- 30/12/2003) has been up-loaded in order to make sure that all with interest in the network can quickly find the EU-standards.

Kind regards,

Mette Vaarst