While the EU organic market grew overall, imports of organic agri-food products decreased slightly between 2019 and 2020.
In 2020, the EU imported 2.79 million tonnes of organic agri-food products, a decline of 1.9% compared to the 2.85 million tonnes imported in 2019.
These are among the main findings of the ‘EU imports of organic agri-food products – key developments in 2020’ market brief published by the European Commission.
Main imported organic products
Regarding product categories, by far the biggest category is tropical fruit, nuts and spices representing 30% of volume or 0.84 million tonnes, followed by oilcakes (8% or 0.23 million tonnes), beet and cane sugar (7% or 0.19 million tonnes) and vegetables (5% or 0.15 million tonnes).
Commodities (which include cereals, vegetable oils and oilseeds, sugars, milk powders and butter, unroasted coffee and cocoa) represented 48% of 2020 imports in terms of volume and 29% in terms of value.
As for other primary products (including meat products, fruit, vegetables, milk, yoghurt and honey), they accounted for 42% of imports in terms of volume and 53% in terms of value.
Honey is the main imported animal product. Its imports in 2020 declined by around 7% due to lower imports from Mexico and especially China, despite an increase from Brazil.
Imports of other organic animal products in the EU are small and in 2020 amounted together to just over 500t.
Bovine and sheepmeat, as well as non-edible animal products, were imported mainly from the Mercosur; while very small amounts of dairy products (cheese and yoghurt) were shipped from the US.
Destinations
In terms of destinations, the largest volume of products still enter the EU through the Netherlands, with 31% of imports.
Germany, Belgium and France follow, with respectively 18%, 11% and 10% of organic products imported by those countries into the EU.
The main trading partners regarding imports of these products in the EU are Ecuador (12%), the Dominican Republic (9%), China (8%) and Ukraine (8%).
The ten largest export countries of organic products to the EU represented 64% of organic imports in 2020.