Information about work, life and play in Regional Australia

Monday, March 26, 2007

Regional Living Australia - Food Snippets

In a recent post I mentioned that Goolwa in South Australia had become Australia's first Cittaslow town, a sign of the continuing change in Australia as people search for new life styles.

Now I see from the Organic Food Blog that sales of organic food in Australia are estimated at about $500 million a year and are growing at 25-50 per cent a year (between 30 and 50% at retail).

The problem is that demand is outstripping supply, with Australian organic production only growing at between 6 and 15 percent a year. One difficulty here is the process that farmers have to go through to get accreditation as an organic supplier, creating lags in the supply chain.

Over on the Australian Technology and IP blog - yes, I get around - a short post making the point that in Australia the only geographical indications (a Geographical Indication (GI) is an official description of a region to protect the reputation and name of a product of that region) are for an Australian wine zone, region or sub-region.

GI is similar to the Appellation naming system used in Europe. There are no Australian geographic indications currently for food products. I suspect that this is a very real gap.

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