Organic in Europe - Recent Developments

The year 2020 with the COVID-19 crisis was a special year for the organic sector. While the consolidated data for 2019 show a continued growth trend for both organic production and market, in 2020 the market grew considerably faster than in the previous years as consumers turned to health and wellness products and paid more attention to disease prevention. For the UK, for instance, where annual growth rates had been at around 5 percent in recent years, growth was far higher in 2020. Should this trend continue through the post-pandemic times, it is bound to impact organic farmland growth, making it more likely that the European Commission's aim of achieving an organic area share of 25 percent by 2030 will be reached. Apart from strong consumer interest, political support measures including a good regulatory framework, adequate support under the CAP, action plans and support for research and knowledge building will be crucial to achieving this goal. The latest data for Europe show that organic farmland has reached about 16.5 million hectares (EU: 14.6 million hectares) or a share of around 3.3 percent (EU: 8.1 percent). The European Union's organic farmland share is far higher than in most countries and regions of the world; globally, about 1.5 percent of the farmland is organic (72.3 million hectares in 2019). The European Commission aims to reach 25 percent organic area share by 2030. Austria already reached this benchmark in 2019 (more than 26.1 percent of the farmland was organic) and two other Member States are very close to it: Estonia (22.3 percent) and Sweden (20.4 percent). In 2019, the organic market again grew faster than the organic area. Data shows that the EU organic food market increased to more than 41 billion euros or by 8 percent, whereas the farmland grew by 6 percent. While it is good to see strong market growth, the organic farmland area needs to continue to grow strongly as well to reach the 25 percent organic area share goal as set out by the European Commission (2020) in its Farm to Fork strategy