Welcome to this edition of the CIAA newsletter.

The last few months have proven to be a very active period within the food and drink industry. Much of CIAA’s focus has been placed on the Platform for Action and the Vice-President Verheugen’s High Level Group on the Competitiveness of the Agro-Food Industry.

The platform plenary meeting held on 2nd July offered CIAA the opportunity to present the results of the Monitoring Survey, where we have been looking at the performance of our commitments, such as the take up of Guideline Daily Amount (GDA) labelling, amongst 2,026 food and drink producers – including both multinationals and family-owned businesses.  Results reveal that an increasing number of European producers, large and small, are actively implementing the voluntary GDA nutrition labelling system.

The work of the High Level Group (HLG) has now started in earnest.  This is an important initiative for CIAA, which we believe has the potential to lay the foundation for improved competitiveness, and also offers us the opportunity to put essential food and drink industry requirements into the political limelight.  As a sherpa to our President Mr. Jean Martin, I am strongly committed to active involvement and will continue to emphasise the necessity for a holistic and integrated food policy that focuses on the needs and the role of the sector as a whole.

At the beginning of this month, CIAA organised a Conference on the ‘Competitiveness of European agro-food SMEs’ in Brussels, which offered an opportunity to look into a range of issues key to agri-food SMEs.  SMEs are the backbone of the F&D industry – our 280,000 SMEs employ 61.3% of all food and drink workers and generate 48.5% of our turnover.  We were delighted to have several key speakers from SMEs join us.  The conclusions of this conference represent valuable input into the work programme of the HLG.

Finally, I would like to wish you a very enjoyable and relaxing summer break!

Mella Frewen