AgriMin Oros: Romania has not notified the EC of any quality scheme in the last 13 years

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Adrian Oros, told on Monday a press conference that quality schemes represent the way to promote Romanian products, "an intelligent way for no one to be able to accuse you so that you enter the infringement procedure".

"In 13 years, the ministry or Romania through the ministry has not notified the European Commission of any quality scheme. Presently, we have the approval of the Commission for the traditional product as a national and European quality scheme. We also have three more quality schemes in the final notification stage," said Adrian Oros.

"This had to be done a long time ago. In addition to avoiding the infringement, you could access money for promotion if you promoted these national quality schemes. So we have 'premium quality scheme', 'guaranteed quality scheme' and 'prescription quality scheme' or 'ancient recipe'. We have also started, these past days, the demarches for the ?local product quality scheme' and the ?ethical product'. We will speed up this process of validating these quality schemes, having them recognized by the Commission so that we can promote Romanian products through these quality schemes on the one hand, and on the other hand, to access European money for their promotion and not to enter the infringement procedures," explained the Minister of Agriculture.

As regards Law 28/2020 on the marketing of foodstuffs, Adrian Oros, stressed that there is a desire for the European Directive to be transposed as soon as possible, so that "there are no longer those hidden provisions, which wildly disadvantaged the producer and the small processor and shelf access was very difficult.
"I would like to clarify this aspect because I saw all weekend that there are debates on this topic, the sale of Romanian agri-food products and there was a lot of confusion. Nobody knew what the history of this law was," said the Minister of Agriculture.