the world of organic agriculture - Organic Eprints

4 Data Collection and Processing
Bàrbara Baraibar 1
For the first time “The World of Organic Agriculture” includes not only information on total
organic area but also on land use and on major crops. Collecting and processing all this new
information has been a great challenge. Despite all the efforts made, this new approach to
document organic production worldwide is only an initial attempt in this direction, and the
information is far from being a complete.
We therefore ask the readers of this book to treat the data on land use with caution.
This chapter explains how this data was collected, classified and how finally it gave rise to the
graphs and tables published in some chapters of the present edition of the book.
4.1 Data Collection
Organic data collection, processing and classification on a global level are not yet as developed as
for agriculture in general. In spite of the dynamic growth of organic farming in many countries,
the existing systems for agricultural statistics do not include organic agriculture figures.
Many efforts, however, are currently being made – for instance by the FAO or by Eurostat - to
build a standardized system that will finally make it possible to have high quality, easily accessible
and comparable statistical information. Another current activity is the European project
European Information System for Organic Markets (EISfOM) 2 , a concerted action funded by
the European Commission, running from 2003 to 2006. Its main aim is to develop a framework
for the collection and processing of reliable and comprehensive data on organic production and
markets.
During the survey, the lack of a unified system became evident and many expected and some
unexpected problems arose. The main handicaps were:
• Gathering the figures was not always easy, especially in Africa and Asia, either because
statistical information does not exist or because the information is spread all over
the country and it is not available in a compiled format. For other countries, the
information might exist, but it might not be precise and up-to-date.
• As a result, the information for some countries refers to more than one year for
different crops (for instance, the information on the organic coffee area in Cameroon
is from 1998, although the total organic area is for 2003).
• In some countries it was impossible to reach the people working on organic
agriculture, even when we knew that organic organizations existed and were carrying
1 Bàrbara Baraibar, in charge of conducting the 2005/2006 survey; at FiBL from October 2005 to January 2006, now
Barcelona, Spain. Contact via FiBL (info.suisse@fibl.org).
2 European Information System for Organic Markets (EISfOM): http://www.eisfom.org
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