Organic Markets in Europe

摘要

Retail sales of organic food and beverages in European countries have enjoyed substantial growth over the past ten years. Sales growth in some countries has been as high as 85 percent. However, organic products continue to be a small percentage of thetotal food market. The United Kingdom, Switzerland and Denmark lead in terms of percentages of organic vegetables consumed. Most consumers appear willing to pay a price premium of up to 20 percent. One of the significant problems in analyzing organic markets is the lack of reliable, verifiable data, both in production, prices and imports. Organic import data is not broken out separately, so the real levels of imports are really estimates. Europe cannot be analyzed as a single entity, as each country appears to be behaving differently with regard to organic policy, internal production, consumption and imports.