As someone who has a keen interest in the organic sector of agriculture, I was pleased to see the ‘horsegate’ scandal come to the forefront of the public’s attention earlier this year. This made consumers not only across the UK but the whole of Europe focus on their food and the long chains associated with its production.

Although the UK organic market has still shown an annual decline of 1.5% (2012), recent figures from Kantar Worldpanel show some retailers increasing sales by 20% in early 2013, mainly due to ‘horsegate’.  A strong growth of the global organic market of 25% over the past 3 years, along with urgent questions being asked on the reliance of cheap, low quality, untraceable food and recent positive sales figures all suggest the market will return to growth.

A strong area of growth for the organic market is online shopping, with companies such as Abel and Cole, Ocado and Riverford reporting sales increases of 10% in 2013. Another key trend which my household can relate to is the ‘Jamie Generation’.  My husband was mollycoddled like so many young men are that when I first met him he couldn’t boil an egg.  When I taught him the age old trick of testing if pasta is cooked (For those of you who don’t know, you throw a strand at the wall and if it sticks, hey presto, its ready!), he looked rather bemused and replied ‘what the whole pan?’ Thankfully after reading many Jamie Oliver recipe books, he is now an excellent cook, cares about the quality of his food and even goes as far as growing his own herbs and vegetables.  Under 35s are increasingly becoming ethically aware, interested in food and have significantly increased their spending on organic products pointing to a healthy future for the organic market.

Whilst the UK saw a decline in annual organic sales in 2012, on average the continent saw an increase of 7%. We have to question why this is? After visiting BIOFACH the largest organic exhibition in Germany earlier this year, I was amazed at the size of it (you could drop the NEC into a corner of it).  What was disappointing was the representation from our certifying bodies. Even Uganda had their certifying body displaying, but where were Organic Farmers and Growers, Soil Association and SOPA? Apparently they were there walking the exhibition but chose not to display. This I find is mind boggling, we should be doing all we can to tap into the growing Global market and to do that we need our certifying bodies to represent us and show what the UK has to offer.

Let’s hope they decide to show up at BIOFACH 2014 and together we can finally reverse this decreasing annual sales pattern.

PS: For those non-believers a Lincolnshire based organic farmer has this week achieved 3.5t an acre with Nelson Winter Wheat