“The area of land used for organic farming and the number of enterprises involved in organic farming in Hungary has practically doubled during the course of a single year. While organic farming was performed on 120 thousand hectares in 2015, 200 thousand hectares were used for this purpose in 2016”, Minister of Agriculture Sándor Fazekas said on Thursday as a conference at Szent István University in Gödöllő.
At the conference entitled “The State of Ecological Farming in Hungary - Where Are We on the Road to Sustainability”, organised by the Research Centre for Ecological Agriculture and the Szent István University’s Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the Minister of Agriculture said: “We want to create produce that consumers like and want to buy. These products must without question be traditional, healthy, GMO-free and natural”.
Mr. Fazekas also highlighted the importance of consumer awareness with relation to this, the development of which must be facilitated. “A country in which GMOs are cultivated can hardly claim to have a clean environment, and accordingly we must stand up to protect our GMO-free agriculture”, he continued.
“The Research Centre for Ecological Agriculture is already serving this goal via its research network, which it has developed with hundreds of companies, providing us with a level of knowledge that assures the continuous market presence of these products”., the Minister added.
In his lecture, Minister of State for Agricultural and Rural Development Miklós Zsolt Kis from the Prime Minister’s Office said that funding organic farmers must remain one of the targets of the post 2020 period, adding that 64.38 billion forints (EUR 208M) in funding has been provided so far to facilitate the transition to ecological farming, the running of organic farms and the ecological farming of farmland within a traditional framework.