The World of Organic Agriculture

This annual publication documents statistics and trends around the world in organic agriculture, and is chock full of fascinating data. Australia has more organic land -- over five times as much -- as the next country, China. The leading European country is Italy with 1.1 million hectares, of which a quarter is olives. There are graphs indicating the growth in the global market for organic food and drink as well as of land under organic cultivation. In Europe, the two leading consumers of organic food are Germany and the UK, but Switzerland has the highest per capita consumption. In Europe as a whole there are nearly 204,000 organic farms, which represents about a quarter of the world's total. To put this in perspective, European organic farms occupy 1.6% of the European agricultural area and 4% in the EU. Similar detailed statistics and charts are provided for other parts of the world. This is not a book for the general reader, but an extremely useful point of reference which should be available in your local library.