Organic Fruit Production in Europe

PART I: SHORT HISTORY OF ORGANIC FARMING The organic fruit production in Europe is not only a matter of statistics, regulations and tables but also has a meaningful historical background. So as an introduction, we can take a brief excursion back to the roots and the evolution of organic farming. (The following text is closely—but not entirely—based on an overview article of Gunter Vogt, 2000a). Organic farming’s origins in the first decades of the 20th century need to be understood in the context of five main aspects

On f-vectors of Minkowski additions of convex polytopes

The objective of this paper is to present two types of results on Minkowski sums of convex polytopes. The first is about a special class of polytopes we call perfectly centered and the combinatorial properties of the Minkowski sum with their own dual. In particular, we have a characterization of face lattice of the sum in terms of the face lattice of a given perfectly centered polytope. Exact face counting formulas are then obtained for perfectly centered simplices and hypercubes. The second type of results concerns tight upper bounds for the f-vectors of Minkowski sums of several polytopes.Comment: 13 pages, submitted to Discrete & Computational Geometr

Congestion in planar graphs with demands on faces

We give an algorithm to route a multicommodity flow in a planar graph $G$ with congestion $O(\log k)$, where $k$ is the maximum number of terminals on the boundary of a face, when each demand edge lie on a face of $G$. We also show that our specific method cannot achieve a substantially better congestion

Consumer Reaction to the «Flavour Group Concept» to introduce Scab Resistant Apple Varieties into the Market. «Variety-Teams» as a Further Development of the Concept

A tool to ease the market introduction of scab resistant apple varieties in supermarkets, is the so-called «Flavour Group Concept (FGC; Weibel and Grab, 2000) that has been developed by FiBL and «Coop» (second biggest supermarket retailer of Switzerland) already in 1995. The FGC is providing to the buyers additional information on the specific flavour direction of that "unknown" apple cultivar in front of them (mild to sweet; spicy-tart; predominantly tart). In 2002 a consumer behaviour study was undertaken by «IHA/GfK-Switzerland» Institute to evaluate the consumer response to the FGC. The results reveal that 36 % of the persons interviewed at the point of sale considered additional information on the flavour direction of the apple cultivars as «important» and 40 % as «very important». Information on flavour direction was considered as the second important information at the shelf (59 % score), compared to the general presentation of the apples with 78 % score. On basis of these positive results, Coop introduced the FGC also for conventional apples. One year later, also the biggest supermarket retailer of Switzerland «Migros»introduced a FGC for organic and conventional apples. To develop further the FGC, in the year 2002, a consortium of the supermarket chain Coop Switzerland, organic apple growers, retailers and FiBL experts joined together in a so called «Variety Team». There, in contrast to Variety Clubs, the focus is not a particular variety but the active creation and promotion of an attractive assortment of scab resistant apple varieties in a well co-ordinated and thus for growers and retailers most efficient way. Investments and risks are evenly shared between the Team Partners. The first cultivar promoted is «Ecolette»