Area under organic farming expands seven-fold in five years

The area under organic farming in the country has expanded over seven-fold in the last five years to cross the half-a-million hectares mark in 2007-08. The exports of organically produced products, too, have surged over four-fold to touch Rs 300 crore, up from just around Rs 73 crore in 2003.

These numbers have been compiled by the International Competent Centre for Organic Agriculture (ICCOA), an organisation of the stakeholders in the organic cultivation and product marketing business. It projects the organic sector to grow 6-7 times in the next five years.

This will increase the country’s exports of organic products to nearly Rs 2,500 crore by 2012. As a result, India’s share in the total global organic produce market, estimated at a meagre 0.2 per cent now, will swell to 2.5 per cent by 2012.

The acreage under organic cultivation is estimated to have risen over seven-fold from 73,000 hectares in 2003 to nearly 538,000 hectares in 2007-08. Significantly, it is projected to expand further by nearly four times to cross the 2 million-hectares mark by 2012.

Worldwide, about 30.4 million hectares are reckoned to be under chemicals-free organic cultivation. The present annual global trade of organic products is worth around $38.6 billion. This is more than double the total trade of around $18 billion in 2000.

The pace of growth is anticipated to gain further momentum in the coming years, thanks to the rapidly increasing demand for health-friendly organic products, which normally enjoy a price premium of 30-40 per cent over the normal products.

“Organic food is healthy as it has no residues of pesticides in it. Besides, organic food is relatively far better in taste and quality,” said ICCOA executive director Manoj Kumar Menon. Consequently, more and more people worldwide are switching over to the organic foods, he added.

However, the organic farming in the country still faces several constraints, the ICCOA points out. There is a general lack of credible research and development effort, especially for developing package of agronomic practices suitable for organic cultivation. Besides, the technically sound and successful commercial scale business models are not readily available.

Moreover, though organic farming has been in vogue in different parts of the world for over two decades now, there have been no systematic studies to compare organic systems of farming with conventional cultivation in terms of productivity, product quality and cost of cultivation.

However, some states, where the consumption of chemical fertilisers and pesticides is, in any case, very little, are reportedly in the process of declaring themselves as “organic states”.

Assam was declared the ‘Organic State of the Year’ at the recently concluded India Organic Trade Fair, 2008, at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi. This fair was organised jointly by ICCOA, the Agricultural and Processed Food Export Development Authority and the International Organic Farming Association.

Business worth over Rs 125 crore is estimated to have been generated at the four-day event in which over 200 Indian and foreign organic agribusiness organisations displayed their products.