French Organic Sales Jump 25%…

Looks like the French got us beat. In 2008, organic food sales in the United States increased by 17%, but during the same year. Sales of organics in France grew 25%.

And in the past three years, organic spending in France jumped 60%. That’s 2.6 billion euros, according France’s organic association.

There are some cool reasons why. French consumers are avoiding foods with pesticides and genetically-modified organisms and the government is encouraging more organic foods in schools and restaurants.

Now, to accommodate the higher demand, local farmers are converting more land for organics, nearly tripling the amount of hectares devoted to organic crops since 1999.

However, compared to total food sales, the percentage of organic sales only increased 0.6%, reaching 1.7% for 2008, up from 1.1% in 2007, but the recent economic downturn my harm those figures for next year. Let’s hope not!

Via Reuters.

Tags: crops, farming, GMOs, restaurants

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Organic, Organic Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.