Organic farming is loss of speed, in particular due to inflation.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
suffering from inflation and faced with a drop in demand, organic is awarded a boost. The Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, announced Tuesday, December 6, an additional financial means for the organic agency, responsible for the development, promotion and structuring of French organic farming. “This sector, like others, is going through a crisis, and there is no question of dropping it and abandoning the objective of 18 % of the French agricultural area in organic in 2027”, told the Agency France-Presse (AFP) The Minister, on the occasion of the Assizes of Agriculture and Biological Food.
In front of the players in the sector, he announced the payment in 2023 of an additional 5 million euros in the Avenir Bio fund, managed by the organic agency and intended to help producers to invest and enhance their productions, including ” The criteria will evolve in order to be able to finance more projects “, and a state participation up to 750,000 euros in the Bio Agency for the deployment of a new communication campaign.
Additional means allocated to the organic agency aim to initiate studies by the end of the year to have “a finer understanding of the crisis, and in particular reasons for reducing demand”, and To reflect on organic consumption scenarios by 2040, said Mr. Fesneau. “The increase in organic demand also involves public orders. Today, we are 6 % of organic orders in collective catering. We have a job to do on it with local communities”, in particular To increase the share of organic food in canteens, estimated the minister.
reduction of sales by 5 %
With the 5 million euros announced by the Minister, the Avenir Bio fund will be equipped with a total of 13 million euros, to which will be added “2 million euros in binding of the recovery plan”. These additional funds must make it possible to initiate a reflection on the structuring of the sectors, such as the organic pork sector, which today undergoes a particularly acute crisis of demand.
While welcoming the state’s commitment, the president of the National Federation of Organic Agriculture, Philippe Camburet, regretted that the Minister has announced “no direct aid for producers”. “All this money, which will be useful to communicate on the sector, will not help farmers in distress. This is the first time that we have faced such a crisis and it is the first time that we have been asking for Direct aid, as is the case for other sectors, “he told AFP, evoking for example the massive state support for the conventional pig sector, structurally deficit.
After ten years of two -digit growth, the organic market is struck hard by inflation, consumers fall back on cheaper products. According to the IRI consumption data analysis company, the turnover of the organic sector will decrease for the second year in a row. At the end of October 2022, the drop in sales over one year amounts to almost 5 %. Currently, France has 56,000 organic farms, for 10.3 % of the useful agricultural area.