the world of organic agriculture - Organic Eprints

15 Organic Farming in Europe
In the European Union (EU) more than 5.8 million hectares are managed organically by almost
140’000 farms. This constitutes 3.4 percent of the agricultural area and 1.5 percent of the farms
in the EU. The increase in the European Union compared to the previous year is mainly due to
high growth rates in the new member states (for instance Lithuania: + 100 percent, Poland + 60
percent). The area under organic management is in most cases, however, not as high as in the
countries of the “old” European Union. The Czech Republic, though, has converted more than six
percent of its agricultural land, which is a higher percentage than Germany has. But also in other
countries like Portugal, Austria Germany, Greece the organic land area increased. Compared to
the previous year in the EU there has been a drop in the number of organic farms, due to the
decrease of the number of farms and land under organic management in Italy.
Graph 13: Development of organic farming in the European Union 1985-2004. From 2003 the
New Member States are included (accession May 2004)
Sources: Welsh Institute of Rural Sciences, UK-Aberystwyth, SOEL, D-Bad Dürkheim, FiBL, CH-Frick
The difference between individual countries regarding the importance of organic farming is
substantial. More than 13 percent of agricultural land is organic in Austria, more than 11 percent
in Switzerland, around seven percent in Finland, Italy and Sweden. Some countries have yet to
reach one percent. The country with the highest number of farms and the biggest organic land
area is Italy. Almost one fifth of the EU’s organic land and almost a quarter of its organic farms
are located here.
According to the FiBL survey 2005 /2006 in Europe the organic agricultural land (6.5 million
hectares) is mainly used for arable cropping (42 percent of organic land) and for permanent
pastures (45 percent). Permanent crops amount for seven percent of the land. Only for six
percent of the organic land no information on the main land use categories was available.
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