Europe

Summary

Since the be ginning of the 1990s, organic farm ing has rapidly developed in almost all European countries. Growth has, however, slowed down recently.
According to the Swiss Research Institute of Or ganic Agriculture FiBL, by the 31.12.2002 in the 15 countries of the European Union (EU), around 4.8 million hectares were man aged organically by al most 140,000 farms. This constituted 3.5 percent of the agricultural area and 2 percent of the farms in the EU.
According to the SOEL-statistics in the whole of Europe cur rently 5.6 mil lion hect ares are managed or gani cally by ap prox imately 175,000 farmers.
Compared to the previous year, this is an increase of 9 percent in the organic land area in the EU, mainly due to a strong growth in France, Spain and the UK. The number of farms went down, however, mainly due to a decrease in organic farms in Italy.
There are also sub stantial differ ences between indi vid ual countries re gard ing the importance of organic farm ing. More than 11 percent of ag ricultural land is organic in Austria, and 10 percent in Switzerland. Some countries have yet to reach one percent.
The coun try with the highest number of farms and the greatest number of hectares is Italy. One quarter of the European Union’s organic land and more than one third of its
organic farms are located here.
A complete overview of the statistical development of the organic sec tor since the 1990s is available at the homepage of the Or ganic Cen tre Wales at www.organic.aber.ac.uk/stats.shtml.