“It will be a gigantic administrative effort,” said Hansueli Loosli, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Transgourmet Holding AG based in Basel, at the “Talk in the Castle” of Raiffeisenbank Kleinmünchen/Linz in the Hohenbrunn Hunting Museum in St. Florian. What is meant is the taxonomy, the sustainability guideline of the EU Commission.
A company that wants to be sustainable must make this a top priority, said Loosli. The EU’s plans are designed to turn this issue into a “bureaucratic monster”. At Transgourmet and the Swiss Coop Group, they started offering sustainable products together with customers back in the 1990s. “We were still laughed at back then,” said Loosli. In Switzerland, the retail market now has a market share of around 20 percent for conventional products and around 60 percent in the sustainable sector. The total turnover of the Coop Group was EUR 31.2 billion in the previous year, of which around EUR 6 billion came from sustainable products.
For the chief analyst at Raiffeisen Research, Peter Brezinschek, current economic policy is anything but sustainable. It is becoming apparent that Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on China, for example for rare earths. (hn)
Source: Nachrichten
