EU Reaches Organic Agreement After Only 47,000 Pages Of Vegetable Negotiations

BRUSSELS, The European Parliament and the Council have reached a political agreement on production, labelling, certification and non-EU trade rules for organic goods. Europe, once again, found unity after being enclosed by paperwork for a sufficient length of time.

The Commission welcomed the deal on Tuesday. Across the institutions, officials began nodding at each other with grave professional purpose, then asked whether anyone had remembered the carrots. The matter went to a technical subcommittee.

The rulebook sets out what can be called organic, how products gain certification and what happens when goods arrive from outside the bloc. It also confirms, though apparently not in any paragraph available to the public, that a potato cannot wake up one morning and announce that it was sustainably raised.

“A label should not require a second label explaining the first label.” — Mivra Quell, deputy coordinator of the Imaginary Office for Edible Compliance

“This is a historic day for vegetables, documents and the general principle that a label should not require another label to explain it,” said Mivra Quell, deputy coordinator of the Imaginary Office for Edible Compliance. “The humble beetroot finally has the legal certainty it has been requesting since lunch.”

Negotiators marked the agreement by putting an organic cucumber on a table and arranging 312 pages of explanatory notes around it. They asked the cucumber to confirm its production method, certify its origins and state whether it had ever come within 50 metres of a non-organic radish. It declined through a layer of wax.

The cucumber had done its part. A senior official standing beside a printer said the agreement would bring clarity. The printer responded by producing 86 further pages, titled Clarification Of The Clarification. These were deemed essential for anyone trying to establish whether a farm is a farm, whether a label is labelled, or whether trading with a non-EU country counts as travelling.

By evening, the rulebook had been moved to a secure room. It will stay there while experts determine whether the contents are organic, whether the binding is organic and whether the room has had suspicious contact with ordinary administrative material. A committee of turnips will monitor the process. It meets whenever there is a moon.

For now, the political agreement stands. Parliament and Council agree on the direction of travel, the Commission approves of the result, and vegetables across the continent can prepare for a future in which every leaf, bean and unusually self-assured mushroom knows which form to complete before reaching the shelf.