The role of the "integrated production" scheme in the fruit and vegetable CMO

The new Common Market Organization (CMO) for the fruit and vegetable sector approved in 2007, continues to include sustainability and competitiveness among its most important goals. In this contest, the key role is played by Producer Organizations (POs): they help farmers to organize and to concentrate their supply, and to apply the best available growing, preserving and packaging technologies, in order to become more competitive but also sustainable from an environmental point of view. To this aim POs usually support also new production techniques like “Integrated Pest Management” (IPM) and “Integrated Production” (IP) by offering technical assistance to farmers. The main objective of IP schemes is to reduce the use of pesticides and therefore to reduce costs and to increase the environmental sustainability. However, differently from the case of organic products, in the case of IP no EU regulation exists. The absence of this common standard has allowed regional authorities to introduce different definitions of IP. Moreover large retail chains often apply chain-specific requirements, based on the “idea” of IP and often also on regional IP scheme but always with quite important differences. The actual result is that farmers producing vegetables and fruits must often apply, for the same product grown on the same farm, different technologies in order to obtain different certifications all based on the IP scheme but with quite different interpretations. At the farm level, these different schemes imply a relevant increase in costs of production and commercialization, without generating any positive economic effect, on one side, and with a large degree of uncertainty in terms of impact on environmental sustainability of these production technologies. Starting from the case of fruit production in Emilia-Romagna region, this paper discusses these negative implications together with the possibility for large retail chains to exercise some oligopsony power with respect to POs also using IP schemes. Few implications are drawn with respect to the potential benefits of a common IP scheme defined by EU regulation, and about the main characteristics that this certification should have.