A World Map of Organic Agriculture

Summary

This paper presents a world map of organic agriculture. A Gall-Peters projection map of the world is taken as the reference map (where map areas are proportional to territorial areas). Applying the area of organic agriculture to countries, the World Map of Organic Agriculture presents countries as proportional in size to their share of the total of world organic hectares (such a map can be referred to as an equal-area cartogram or a densityequalising
map). The World Map of Organic Agriculture accounts for 37.2 million hectares of organically managed agricultural land (certified organic and in-conversion organic) from 160 countries, and here distributed across the 200 territories of the reference map. The World Map of Organic Agriculture visually reveals global contiguity and regional relationships among and between the territories of the world, and highlights the regional strengths and weaknesses of the global diffusion of organic agriculture. The World Map of Organic Agriculture is generated by the Worldmapper GIS algorithm developed at the University of Sheffield as a cartographic visualisation tool. It is the first Worldmapper cartogram to proportionately represent Falkland Islands (Malvinas).