Fewer farmers are choosing to go organic, according to statistics from the UK's department for environment, food and rural affairs, due to the faltering sales of organic produce during the economic downturn,' the Guardian has reported.
In 2010, a mere 51,000ha of land was in conversion, the statistics showed, compared with some 158,000ha in 2007.
According to the Soil Association, sales of organic products dropped by 5.9 per cent in the UK last year, from £1.84bn (€2.1bn) in 2009 to £1.73bn (€1.98bn) in 2010, and significantly down on the 2008 peak of £2.1bn (€2.4bn).
Although there was a small rise in the total area of land organically farmed last year, from 619,000ha to 668,000ha, this figure is expected to fall in a numbr of years.
'This is very worrying,' Kirtana Chandrasekaran, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth, told the Guardian. 'What this points to is that the UK government is doing barely anything to promote organic farming, despite the benefits of it.'
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