the world of organic agriculture - Organic Eprints

4 Data Collection and Processing
The table above shows that Australia / Oceania has a low percentage of countries covered by the
survey. The nine countries that did not provide data are, however, small islands, and the survey
does cover the biggest country, Australia.
Hence Africa can be seen as the continent for which the least data was available. 45 percent of
the countries did, however, provide figures, showing that information availability and quality
improves every year on this continent.
In Asia, 60 percent of the countries answered the survey, and new countries like Armenia,
Palestine or Saudi Arabia have been included in the book for the first time.
The percentage rises when we take a look at the European results. The countries that did not
answer were Belarus, San Marino, Andorra and Monaco (the last three being countries where
agriculture is of little importance). For the first time this book provides information for countries
like Macedonia and Moldova.
Finally, the survey was answered by 70 percent of the Latin American countries, including the
largest countries.
It has also to be taken into account that land use information was not provided by all countries
that answered the survey. We could not obtain any crop information for 52 percent of the total
organic area worldwide, which accounts for almost 16.3 million hectares. Of this land
almost one quarter is located in Australia. A major part of the Australian organic land is used for
extensive grazing.
Graph 1: Main land uses in organic farming worldwide according to the data collected: share (%)
of the total global organic area. FiBL-Survey October 2005– January 2006
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