12 – Organic Agriculture
In this week’s weblog we look into organic agriculture in Spain. Organic Agriculture in Spain The amount of hectares that was dedicated to organic farming was 1,845,039 hectares (in 2011) , making Spain the number one European member state that grows organic crops on such a large scale. Within this huge size, cereals is cultivated on 178,061 hectares. Next to this, the number of organic farmers increased to 32,837, an increase of 18.23% (Weiss, N.D.) . From the total production, an estimated 80% of it is destined for export, mainly intended for other European countries (89.2%) such as Germany, France and the UK. Figure 1: Development of organic land and farms in Spain 1991-2008 (Organic-Europe, 2008) The pioneers of organic farming were strongly motivated to produce organic products for the internal and local consumption because of this they were organized in cooperatives, where one national support organization for organic farming helped conventional farmers when c
