A Comparative Analysis of the Organic Food Market in Turkey, EU, and US

Abstract

Conventional agriculture has long been criticized about its negative externalities on issues like public health, environment, biodiversity, and all ecological systems on the planet such as environmental pollution, soil erosion, reduction of animal welfare, and negative impacts of GMOs. As an alternative production system to address these problems, organic agriculture has been developed worldwide since the 1970s. In this chapter, an overview of organic agriculture and food market is given and a comparative analysis between organic agricultural markets in EU, US, and Turkey is made after an outlook on the world organic food market. It is seen that EU and US are forthcoming leaders in the organic food market, whilst Turkey remains behind many developed countries in terms of organic production, per capita consumption, and retail sales.