Our Working Group Organics of ESA (vegetables!) conducted a survey amongst its members and concluded that, if the market for organic vegetable seeds is about 5% of the regular seeds market in 2004, the seed companies could supply growers with organic seed for 57 out of 77 investigated species.

Of concern is the control and the administrative and cost burden with the proposed regulations.

In the present draft regulation it is mentioned that each Member state of the EU (currently 12) can set up its own database for organic seed which will function as the basis for granting exemptions or not.

In the worst case scenario, organic seed suppliers have to enter (at a fee) their organic varieties in 12 databases and they have to keep it up to date on a very regular basis.

Also every database may be set up in a different way, making it a nightmare for any international seed company to enter on a regular basis her organic varieties.

It would be better to have only one European database, but I doubt whether there is the political desire to take such a more logical decision.

The final goal should be to have no more exemptions at species-level. Once that goal has been achieved no bureaucratic and costly database systems are necessary anymore and the market will find herself equilibrium between demand and supply like in the regular seeds market.