THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIC FARMING AND THE DISTRIBUTION AND CONSUMPTION OF ITS PRODCUTS

The article describes the impact of globalisation processes on changes in organic agriculture and the market of food articles produced with the help of organic methods. An analysis of changes occurring in organic agriculture shows that it has undergone an essential transformation over the past two decades turning from agriculture having a local character into a sector linked through more and more numerous ties to the global system both in the sphere of production and in the sphere of distribution and consumption. In the last several years the emerging agro-food sector has become covered by the principal components of the global policy consisting of uniform legal regulations, a certification and accreditation system and in a large measure also by uniform principles of the international trade in ecological products. Still in the 1960s and in the 1970s most countries were applying their own national criteria to organic farming, and the production, distribution and consumption of food produced with the help of organic methods had a predominantly local character. In the following years the scale of the system's links began to increase steadily, with individual countries adopting uniform criteria of organic farming. Nearly all countries of the world have been gradually included in the international trade in products supplied by organic agriculture