ABSTRACT
Food and nutritional security remain an issue of global concern especially in developing countries. The practice of organic agriculture has been identified as a pathway to sustainable development and enhancing food security. Arguably, the most sustainable choice for agricultural development and food security is to increase total farm productivity in situ, in developing countries particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Attention must focus on the following: (i) the extent to which farmers can improve food production and raise incomes with low-cost, locally available technologies and inputs (this is particularly important at times of very high fuel and agro-chemical prices); (ii) whether they can do this without causing further environmental damage; and (iii) the extent of farmers’ ability to access markets [1]. Organic farming is one of the sustainable approaches to farming that can contribute to food and nutritional security [2]. Driven by increasing demand globally, organic agriculture has grown rapidly in the past decade [3]. Policy makers at the primary end of the food chains must wrestle with the dual objective of reducing poverty and increasing the flow of ecosystem services from rural areas occupied by small-scale farmers and/or family farms [4]. © 2014 Maggie Kisaka-Lwayo and Ajuruchukwu Obi. “Analysis of Production and Consumption of Organic Products in South Africa,” in Organic Agriculture Towards Sustainability, Vytautas Pilipavicius (Ed.), ISBN: 978953-51-1340-9, InTech, DOI: 10.5772/58356. Available from: https://www.intechopen.com/books/organic-agriculture-towards-sustainability/analysis-of-production-and-consumption-of-organic-products-in-south-africa. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0).
