THE EVOLUTION OF THE RELATIVE POSITION OF 15 EU MEMBERSTATES REGARDING ORGANIC AGRICULTURE

The negative environmental impact of modern agriculturalpractices, the increased use of non-renewable resources and the long-termproductivity of high external inflows in cultivation systems has led manygovernmental and non-governmental organizations to take various initiatives inorder to promote the adoption and expansion of more sustainable agriculturaltechnologies such as the organic agriculture. The purpose of this study is toinvestigate the degree of organic agriculture practices adoption in 15 EU memberstates during 1998-2008. To succeed in this purpose, the methods of Data Analysis,Factorial Correspondence Analysis and Hierarchical Classification were used. Theresearch results showed that although organic agriculture is implemented in allmember states of the EU, there are many deviations among them concerning thedegree of adopting. Moreover, findings revealed that Austria, Sweden and Finlandwere the countries with the highest performance concerning both their degree ofadopting organic agriculture practices and the rates of holdings that integrated intothe organic agriculture program.