ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) was a pioneer in the dissemination of the organic practices and values in society, and played a key role in consolidating organic agriculture movement. Over time, IFOAM innovatively set new standards for organic agriculture certification agencies and took part in the constitution of a hybrid regulation framework of international relevance for organic production, processing and distribution. As a result, statistics show that more than 700,000 farms were certified as organic in 2006, accounting for 30.4 million hectares of organically managed land worldwide (0.65 per cent of total agricultural area). This represented a four-fold increase in relation to the certified surfaces in 1998. The total cultivated surfaces as well as the number of organic certified farms have consistently grown in the last two decades, though at different rates on different continents (Willer et al. 2008).
