The Demand for Organic Food in the Post Recession World

Image source: http://www.turnermason.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/graphs_Page_11-1024x768.jpg

Although sales of food in the healthy and organic food sectors slowed following the onset of the global economic downturn between 2008 and 2009 there were signs that demand began to recover during 2010, at least in the USA.

According to the latest research from Wholefoods market, the USA's biggest retail organic food chain, the interest in healthy and organic food has continued to grow.

Its annual Food Shopping Trends Tracker survey found that organic foods had made a larger impact in consumers' shopping choices in 2010. Three out of four adults continued to purchase natural and/or organic foods and the number of organic products found in their grocery basket had increased. 27 percent of adults said that natural and/or organic foods comprised more than a quarter of their total food purchases in 2010, up from 20 percent in 2009.

It was a different picture in Europe and the UK, both badly affected by the financial crisis, with supermarkets reducing their ranges in response to declining purchasing power and focusing on cheaper and value ranges instead.

This was particularly so in the UK, where the market contracted according to Organic Monitor's latest Global Organic Food & Drink Market report. In the UK, organic sales dropped 13% per cent in 2009 and have been making only a slow recovery since then. Organic Monitor's director, Amarjit Sahota, said that there was a perception that organic food was more expensive and the situation was not helped by the lack of a single global standard for organic products.

He quoted the situation in Denmark, where organic foods have a clear message to consumers, therefore are adopted by a much larger consumer group, making Danish consumers the largest buyers of organic foods in the world.

Nevertheless, although low price was crucial in 2010 and is expected to still be important in 2011, value for money is also expected to be a growing trend for shoppers and the global organic food trade in 2011 is estimated at around US$ 60 billion. Organic farming is practiced on 35 million hectares in 154 countries.

The latest in the UK Food Standards Agency's regular surveys tracking public attitudes to food issues, published February 2011, also found that the biggest concern was prices, with salt amounts in food in second place, followed by the amount of food waste.

Some surveys also suggest that organics are losing ground to "fair trade" products, as ethical shoppers make difficult choices on how best to spend their money.

UK organic farming is also less well-supported and funded than in Europe. The country's Organic Trade Board (OTB) is unhappy that the organic sector is not getting more help from the UK government.

Whereas the majority of EU members' governments or levy bodies supplied funding that did not happen in the UK, according to Huw Bowles of the OTB, who added that public procurement policies specifying certain proportions of organic foods existed in a number of European countries, which was not the case in the UK.

He has also pointed out that the effects of the 2008 Great Recession were worse for the USA than the UK, yet its organic sector had still seen growth in the last two years.

At the same time as the older generations of pesticides are removed from circulation by EU legislation in its drive for healthier food, organic farmers are not going to be alone in the need for low-chemical alternatives coming out from the biopesticides developers that will protect their land and its crop yield without damaging its ecology or fertility.

The combined pressures of the need to increase yields to meet growing populations, governments' efforts to ensure production of healthier food and the demand from consumers for healthy, organic food at prices they can afford make it more than ever urgent for farmers to have access to the tools to do the job both as soon as possible and at prices they can afford.

Perhaps this will encourage efforts to devise a swifter, more integrated system for testing and registration of the new biopesticides, biofungicides and other low-chem agricultural products that could help farmers meet these growing pressures.

Share this post