The world spends 145 billion euros a year on organic food
Shoppers around the world spent 145 billion euros on organic food and drink in 2024, a new record, up from about 136 billion the year before1. That is roughly 4,600 euros every second.
The figure comes from the annual yearbook of FiBL, a Swiss research institute for organic agriculture, and IFOAM, the international federation of organic farming. Both promote organic farming, but their yearbook, built from national statistics, is the standard global source.
Organic farms cover just 2.1% of farmland
For all that spending, organic farming is still a niche. The world’s organic farmland covers 98.9 million hectares, just 2.1% of all farmland, and it barely changed in 20241. It is farmed by 4.8 million organic producers.
That's the share of the world's farmland that is farmed organically
The land is very unevenly spread. Australia alone has 53 million hectares of organic land, more than half the world total. The highest share is in Liechtenstein, where 43.5% of farmland is organic1.
Who buys organic food
The United States is the world’s biggest organic market. Switzerland spends the most on organic food per person, and has the highest share of organic food in its shops of any country1.
What organic farming does for nature, and what it costs
Organic farming avoids synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, and relies instead on crop rotations, manure, natural pest control and a limited list of approved pesticides. That shows up in the wildlife on the farm. A review of 30 years of studies found that organic farms host on average about 30% more species of plants and animals than conventional farms2.
The trade-off is yield. Organic farms usually produce less food from the same land. A large review in the journal Nature found organic yields ranged from 5% lower for some crops to 34% lower where the systems were most comparable4, and a later analysis put the average gap at about 19%3. Growing the same amount of food organically would therefore need more land, and farmland is often taken from nature.
That is why organic is better for nature per hectare, but not always per kilogram of food. The gap can be narrowed: farms that rotate crops or grow several crops together cut the yield gap to around 8 to 9%3. For shoppers worried about pesticides, the page on the effects of pesticides on humans covers who is most exposed.
Where organic food is heading
Organic sales have kept growing, but organic farmland has stalled at around 2% of the world total1. If that continues, organic will remain a premium product for richer shoppers rather than a way of feeding the world.
The more interesting future may lie in borrowing from organic methods rather than in organic certification itself. The research showing that crop rotations and mixed cropping close most of the yield gap3 suggests that conventional farms could adopt some of the same practices to cut their use of pesticides and fertiliser without losing much harvest. That would spread the benefits of organic farming far beyond the 2% of land that carries the label.
The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.
