Organic Farming and the Organic Labelling Law.

This Law in enacted for implementing the EC regulations on organic farming and organic labelling of products. The Law provides for the authorisation of the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food supervising implementation of the new rules on organic food production and labelling processing in light of the EC regulations including approval of the inspection bodies, granting of a license for marketing processing of products imported from third countries and granting of a provisional approval for the use of ingredients of agricultural origin. The Law describes mechanisms for control of production of organic food and products by the companies and enterprises producing or processing an ecological/biological product. The Federal Ministry of Finance and the Customs offices are in charge of import of goods in accordance with the provision of the EC regulations. For monitoring purposes, the Laws describes the responsibilities of the natural and legal persons to disclose information relating to generating, processing, storing, importing and executing of labelled products. The Law provides for the fees and costs of the official acts that should be determined by the state law. The Law further provides for fine regulations for administrative offences and imprisonment punishment for infringement of the EC Regulation. In draft of the Law, obligations mentioned in Directive 98/34/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 22 June 1998 regarding information procedures in the field of standards and technical regulations and the rules governing information society services, last amended by the Directive Council 2006/96/EC of November 20, 2006 are observed.
The Law consists of 5 Articles as: To implement the legal acts of the European Community in the field of organic farming (1); Change of the organic labelling Act (2); Publication permission (3); Repeal of the previous Federal Law (4); Entry into force (5).