BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination

BeeLife

The purpose of the association is to: - To reveal and solve the environmental problems of pollinating insects and more particularly honey bees. - Work for better environmental protection, in particular for agriculture compatible with the well-being of pollinators and biodiversity. The association stimulates, coordinates and promotes projects that aim to achieve its goals. These projects can be developed: - in synergy with the members of the association that finances projects. - in collaboration with other partners (beekeepers, farmers, researchers, NGOs, consumers,...) who work towards our objectives. - by the association itself. It pursues the achievement of its goals by all means and in particular by: - scientific monitoring; - regulatory monitoring and monitoring of European political processes; - analyses and studies; - the dissemination and exchange of information, in particular through publications (in journals and on the Internet...), publishing (report, book, (...)

Lobbying Activity

Response to Conversion to a Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN)

2 Jul 2021

The conversion of the FADN to FSDN is a very positive and needed development. The experience gathered historically in the collection of standardised accounting data and horizontal data analyses already carried out will allow us to better assess the sustainability of the farming practices in Europe. In doing so, comparisons among countries, regions or sectors can be done, the costs of (un-)sustainable practices can be understood and the areas of improvement at the farm and policy level can be identified. As far as possible, authorities should avoid doubling data collection efforts carried out through other programmes or initiatives. FSDN will continue assessing the economic and financial situation of farmers while including the environmental and social dimensions of farming. It will allow providing a more comprehensive image of farming and possible better understand the drivers for farm management choices. As far as possible, a win-win relationship should be established for the data collection: farmers providing the data in a standardised way would receive as soon as possible an objective report of their sustainable situation in environmental, social and economic terms. Possibly, they could receive individual advice to improve their sustainability targets (Farm Advisory Services). Data gathered is communicated in an anonymized way. Environmental parameters should be made available to the public due to the public interest and impact they may have. It should be the choice of the participating farmer to decide the purposes for which he/she shares the economic and social parameters. The lists of parameters included in economic, environmental or social sustainability should be public (published), evolutive and allow public scrutiny. For the decision on which parameters to be taken into account, it would be great if the FSDN would utilise the conceptual framework of the Wedding Cake model of SDGs: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2016-06-14-how-food-connects-all-the-sdgs.html. If the long-term objective is to develop cost-benefit analyses, FSDN data should be enriched with the costs of the externalities, so that the real costs of production could be calculated and publicly communicated. We agree that the technicality of the topic and its clearly defined scope involve that no impact assessment needs to be carried out. This would just delay the data gathering.
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Meeting with Lukas Visek (Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans) and Stichting BirdLife Europe and

13 Mar 2020 ยท Green Deal