Sausage, cheese, ham – Berlin’s “Green Week” offer caters to many clichés – and obviously it should. At the public agricultural products fair, which opened on Friday, around 1,400 exhibitors from 60 countries dove deep into the stereotyped box: the Dutch built a field of tulips with little bridges – along with huge cheese breads -, Croatians and Poles serve schnapps, the Ukrainians cut beetroots – and the Austrians, like the Swiss, tempted visitors with sausages, bacon and cheese, accompanied by brass bands and a density of costumes that, to put it ironically, only surpassed that of the Bavarian Salon.
At the same time, “Green Week” marks the year of agricultural policy. The dominant theme of the fair is climate change and the green transformation of agriculture. “This is a topic that has always concerned us farmers, but now because of the energy crisis it has become a broad discussion”, says Nikolaus Rettenbacher. The farmer from Salzburg runs a cheese dairy with 30 dairy cows and 40 calves as calves. He fights with the parsimony of the population, which demands increasingly cheaper dairy products, but does not see the work and the increase in operating costs of the producers. “But I don’t see people restricting themselves in other areas, like fuel or vacations. Healthy eating is extremely important,” says Rettenbacher, who offers his organic cheese at “Green Week.”
© M. Hirsch
These same issues – of economic, ecological and social sustainability – also arise in Brussels, especially in light of security of supply. “There is no food that I can check in the three boxes,” said Wolfgang Burtscher, director general of agriculture at the EU Commission, on the sidelines of the fair.
Cheese, especially mountain cheese, is Austria’s biggest export to Germany. The trade balance of agricultural products was mixed in the first three quarters of 2022. Exports of agricultural and food products increased in volume by 1.1 percent in this period, the increase in value was even 16.3 percent, or almost 12 billion euros, but it was due to the increase in energy, transport and raw material prices, according to Agrarmarkt Austria (AM). According to the forecast, the external trade balance deficit will amount to 160 million euros. The most important trading partner is Germany, in the previous year exports increased by 15 percent to 4.36 billion euros.
The visit to “Green Week” took place at the invitation of the Austrian Chamber of Agriculture.