Organic Agriculture World-wide: Current Statistics

Summary

Organic agriculture is developing rapidly, and statistical information is now available from 141 countries of the world. Its share of agricultural land and farms continues to grow in many countries. The main results of the global survey on certified organic farming show:
• 32.2 million hectares of agricultural land are managed organically by more than 1.2 million producers, including smallholders (2007). In addition to the agricultural land, there are 0.4 million hectares of certified organic aquaculture.
• The regions with the largest areas of organically managed agricultural land2 are Oceania, Europe and Latin America. Australia, Argentina and Brazil are the countries with the largest organically managed land areas.
• The highest shares of organically managed land are in Europe: Liechtenstein, Austria and Switzerland.
• The countries with the highest numbers of producers are Uganda, India and Ethiopia. Almost half of the world’s organic producers are in Africa.
• About one third of the world’s organically managed land – almost 11 million hectares - is located in developing countries. Most of this land is in Latin American countries, with Asia and Africa in second and third place. Countries with the largest area under organic management are Argentina, Brazil, China, India and Uruguay.
• Almost 31 million hectares are organic wild collection areas and for bee keeping. The majority of this land is in developing countries – quite the opposite of agricultural land, of which two thirds is in developed countries.
• Almost two thirds of the land under organic management is grassland (20 million hectares). The cropped area (arable land and permanent crops) constitutes 7.8 million hectares - a quarter of the organically managed land. Compared with the previous survey, there is a clear trend for cropland to increase. Relatively high shares for some crops have been achieved; organically managed coffee and olive areas reported, for instance, account for more than five percent of the total harvested areas, and in some countries the shares are even higher – 30 percent of Mexico’s coffee is organic.
• On a global level, the organic land area increased by almost 1.5 million hectares compared to the data from 2006. Twenty-eight percent (or 1.4 million hectares) more land under organic management was reported for Latin America (including 0.9 million hectares of in-conversion land in Brazil for which no data had been available previously). In Europe, organically managed land increased by 0.33 million hectares (+ 4 percent) and by 0.18 million hectares (+27 percent) in Africa.