Sustainable and organic agriculture

Today, the world's agriculture faces many environmental, economic and social challenges. Answers to problems often induce development directions that are partly opposed to each other, such as in the case of digitization and ecologization. In our research, we identified the most important sustainability challenges affecting agriculture, the food industry and consumption through descriptive statistical analysis of Eurostat's agri-environment management indicators and HCSO data.

Climate change and environmental degradation present a serious threat to Europe and the entire world. Since the time of the industrial revolution, there has been a significant increase in the average temperature at the world level, and the average temperature at the world level today is higher by 0.94 - 1.03° than at the end of the 19th century. According to the European Environment Agency, the EU is the third largest source of greenhouse gases in the world, right after China and the USA.

Agriculture and food systems are the central driving forces of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. In order to facilitate the transition towards more sustainable forms of food production, understanding and measuring on farm sustainability is crucial to evaluating the status quo and progress of applying on farm environmental measures and eco-practices.

The article primarily provides farmers and consultants with basic information about the current situation of organic farming. Within the framework of the CAPTIVATE program, it provides information on the topic of sustainable and organic farming.

Organic farming is one of the fastest growing farming methods in the world nowadays. Its rapid spread is explained by the fact that many consumers and producers consider it to be the most environmentally sustainable agricultural practice, which provides healthy, safe food for consumers. Organic farming is based on the concept of ecological farming, which is where the adjectives "ecological" and "biological" come from. The aim of ecological farming is to ensure sustainable development, during it reaches back to locally available reserves. 

The world’s agriculture faces many challenges nowadays, such as tackling the effects of climate change, conserving agrobiodiversity, or feeding the Earth’s growing population. These issues often induce conflicting development directions, such as digitalization and ecologization, as the case of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) shows. In the last decades, policymakers have focused mainly on greening agricultural production and the food industry, and now the CAP is part of the European Green Deal.

The importance of organic farming is growing around the world. Globally, 1.5% of the world's agricultural land is currently organic. Around the world, between 2005 and 2019, the agricultural area involved in organic farming expanded to 72.3 million hectares, but the rate of growth varied by continent (Figure 1) (Central Statistical Office).

Several trends have now emerged under the auspices of sustainable agriculture, some of which continue to use conventional tools (chemical control, artificial fertilizers), while other trends completely reject them and look for ecological solutions instead.