The Real Green Revolution - Greenpeace UK

2. The world grows organic
2.1 – Estimating the extent of global organic
production
Only in recent years has published data
regarding the extent of organic agriculture
in the South become available. The
International Trade Centre (ITC) recently
published a directory on products and
market development in the organic sector
(1999) with the aim of fostering trade
opportunities, especially for developing
countries. This provides a country-bycountry
analysis of organic production and
demand, together with details of available
produce and the principal trading and
development organisations. It also provides
some details (though sketchy in places),
about the profiles of ‘non-certified’ activity.
More recently the German organic
organisation, Stiftung Ökologie & Landbau
(SÖL) published a statistical digest of global
organic production (Willer and Yussefi,
2000, 2001). These figures provide the basis
for a more comparative analysis of the extent
of organic production in different parts of
the world (see tables 2.1. and 2.2, below for
summaries). A further useful data source is
the annual IFOAM members Directory
(IFOAM, 2000), which lists members by
country, thereby permitting proxy estimates
of activity rates. 7
The FAO has also prepared a number of
studies of organic systems on a global scale
(FAO, 1998, 1999, 2000a; Scialabba 1999,
2000; Scialabba and Aubert, 1998). 8 They
have recently commissioned a number of
specialist reports and are in the process of
constructing a database of organic literature
(FAO, 2001). Thus the literature providing
global perspectives on OAA, while not
extensive, is rapidly growing and is likely
to be more substantial in forthcoming years.
The SÖL reports (Willer and Yussefi, 2000
& 2001) provide valuable early estimates
of the extent of organic production on a
global basis. Drawing upon the ITC report
(1999) and other data sources, they identify
around 15.8 million hectares of land around
the world that are managed organically.
Argentina is clearly the largest certified
organic producer in the South with 3 million
ha. (1.77% of its total agricultural land)
under organic production. This accounts for
almost 19 % of total global organically
managed land. Other Latin American
countries account for around 1.3% of the
global total of organically managed land.
Africa and Asia account for only fractions
of a percent (0.14% and 0.33% respectively)
(Willer and Yussefi, 2001, p.28). 9
Whilst these figures provide a useful
o v e rv i e w, there are evident omissions in the
data. For example, there is no data for many
countries known to be exporting org a n i c
p roduce to the industrialised world. Wa l a g a
(2000) identifies a number of African
countries which are known to be export i n g
o rganic produce but which do not appear in
these tables. These countries include: Algeria,
Benin, Burkina Faso, Comoro Islands, Ivory
Coast, Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique,
Senegal and South Africa (see table 3.2). Such
d i s c repancies occur due to a number of
factors. In part there is the problem of a time
lag in data collection. Even in the EU, which
has a strong data gathering capacity, it is
d i fficult to collate information that is less
than two years out of date (Foster, pers.
comm.). The rapid expansion of cert i f i e d
o rganic production in the South and the
m o re limited capacity for data collection
mean that the figures provided in Tables 2.1
and 2.2 are almost certainly undere s t i m a t e s .
Other factors may play a key role: the cost
and other constraining factors of cert i f i c a t i o n
(discussed in section 4. 6), means that such
data is only likely to be collected for land
w h e re much, or all, of the crop is destined for
e x p o rt markets. The only likely exceptions to
this are those few countries that have
established their own (IFOAM accre d i t e d )
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