If sales figures are any indication, Europeans are deciding in growing numbers that organic food isn’t worth the additional expense.
The organic industry in the UK – the EU’s third-largest organics market – is in the midst of a three-year-long slump, as consumers favor conventionally farmed products amid the global economic downturn. The drop in sales of organics might also reflect an increasing acceptance of modern agriculture.
Las ventas de alimentos orgánicos han caído en el Reino Unido desde 2009 y el interés en el mercado también está disminuyendo en otros países de la UE, dicen los analistas. Las ventas orgánicas del Reino Unido cayeron casi 6% a $2,79 mil millones en 2010, luego de una disminución de 12,9% en 2009, aunque la tasa de disminución se ha desacelerado en los últimos meses, dice la Soil Association. Los agricultores están respondiendo a la disminución de la demanda y abandonando lo orgánico: la conversión a campos de cultivo orgánico ha bajado dos tercios desde 2007, según el Departamento de Medio Ambiente, Alimentación y Asuntos Rurales.
“It’s a declining market. Not a lot of people are talking about it,” analyst Matthew Phillips of Phillips McDougall said in an interview. “You can’t get as high of a yield with an organic product as you can with a product that is protected by either chemicals or biotechnology.”
Países como Suecia todavía muestran fortaleza en la venta de productos orgánicos, pero son mercados de nicho en comparación con Alemania, Italia y el Reino Unido, dice Dominic Dyer, director ejecutivo de la Asociación de Protección de Cultivos.
“People are watching more carefully what they spend on food and are more inclined to question some of the values of the organic sector,” Dyer said in an interview with Farm Chemicals International. “It’s going on in Germany; it’s going on in France; it’s going on in the Netherlands.”
En Alemania, las ventas de la industria de alimentos orgánicos aumentaron a más del doble de 2000 a 2007, pero recientemente ha sido lenta, ya que más consumidores optan por productos agrícolas convencionales más baratos en lugar de pagar más por los orgánicos, que pueden tener una prima 40%.
Bad press could be having an impact as well. This past summer, bean sprouts from an organic farm in Germany were to blame for the world’s largest E. coli outbreak to date. More than 60 people were killed, thousands more were infected, and the outbreak made headlines across the globe.
The 2009 Food Standards Agency report also played a significant role in swaying the public against organics, Dyer says. The report, which attracted heavy media attention, states flatly that there are “no independent authoritative statements on the nature and importance of differences in content of nutrients and other nutritionally relevant substances … in organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs.”
Hasta la fecha, no hay casos de problemas de salud humana derivados de los OGM, una estadística respaldada por la Organización Mundial de la Salud.
“I think we’ve seen a growing interest in GM technology,” Dyer says. He points to the example of BASF’s new GM potato, which is resistant to the late-blight disease that wipes out up to 20% of the global potato harvest every year.
“The organic industry, by opposing [technology] in principle, is looking like it’s putting its head in the sand and not really dealing with the problem, and I don’t think that’s helping the industry’s reputation either,” he adds.
El gigante químico alemán solicitó la aprobación de la UE de la patata de mesa, llamada Fortuna, a principios de esta semana, y espera lanzarla al mercado en 2014/15.