Roger White wrote
>The big problem is the costs - around 30,000 Cyprus pounds (50,000 Euro) for an outfit of my size - 500 hives.
Finland are there any grants from the EU to help with upgrading to HACCP standard?


First of all, the price you mentioned is out of proportion. I imagine that this could be an offer from a private company making haccp. It's a good business for them if they have experience with honey. But I have to say that if they have no one with experience of honey it will take lot of learning to understand the process and the critical points. Maybe the money is to gather the information. In Finland it would take few days  to make if you sell only honey.  Maybe I should fly over to Cyprus to work it out when its too cold here :) .

Finnish agriculture has many kind of subsidies as other EU countries and USA. For beekeeping there is no subsidies for investments, but we get support for overwintering from national budget. 12 euro/ hive ( we have to buy sugar with 20 - 25 euros/ hive/ winter).

Also we can get development money and this can be used to quality development, for example haccp work. The beekeepers pay 20 - 50 % of the expenses.

Ari

Central Finland

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