Parma attends Brussels conference on PDO certification

02.02.07

Parma, 2 February 2007 - The director of the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma (Parma Ham Consortium) Stefano Fanti will speak at a conference on "Food quality certification - adding value to farm produce" organized by the European Commission for Monday 5 February. 

The two-day convention in Brussels, organized by the European Community's Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, will involve alternating speeches and workshops on the European certification system and the increasing number of certified products and requests for certification from the various member countries. 

Quality, the production chain, raw materials and consumer guarantees are just some of the topics to be discussed during the two days in Belgium.  Specifically, there will be a focus on the quality of food products in Europe and the certification of agribusiness in the international context.  The first day's events will be coordinated by Corrado Pizio Biroli, president of the Scientific Committee of the Qualivita Foundation.  There will be presentations from experts and politicians, including the German and Austrian Ministers of Agriculture, Horst Seehofer and Hans Kordik respectively.  The event will be hosted by the European Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel.
The director of the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma Stefano Fanti will be the only Italian speaker called upon to share his experience of the PDO system in Italy, on the basis of the Consorzio's importance in the region's economy and of the numerous activities it has undertaken to safeguard the Parma Ham name in Italy and around the world.
The term PDO stands for Protected Designation of Origin and refers to EEC Regulation no.2081/92.  The European provisions recognize and define a product as indigenous to a certain region and country when its characteristics are essentially or exclusively dependent on its geographical and environmental origin.  More specifically, the Protected Designation of Origin label applies to products that are unequivocally linked to the geographical area whose name they carry and that meet two conditions: the production of the raw materials and their transformation into the finished product must occur within the region specified by the product name, and the product's quality and characteristics must be traceable to the environment of the product's place of origin, by which we mean natural and human factors such as climate, soil quality and local technical knowledge.

Prosciutto di Parma was one of the first products to receive this status in 1996.  The essential condition for making Parma Ham is that the entire production process must occur in the "characteristic region": an extremely small area consisting of the part of the Province of Parma that is at least 5 kilometers south of the Via Emilia, up to an altitude of 900 meters and bordered to the east by the Enza River and to the west by the Stirone Stream.  Here, and only here, is it possible to produce this great ham.  

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