Organic Farming in Latvia: organic sovereignties

The first organic farmers in Latvia received biodynamic certification through Demeter in Germany, but in 1995 the LBLA was officially founded, and by 1998 it had developed its own national organic certification system. By 2005 LBLA described itself as a professional organization with approximately 850 members.

In 2004, Latvia had almost 17,000 hectares of certified organic arable land cultivated by 350 farmers. This represented less than 1% of arable land in Latvia.

In 2014, a decade later, the picture was dramatically different. Organic land area had exploded to 195,000 hectares, cultivated by nearly 4,000 farmers. Latvia had 10,8% of its arable land managed organically, and in 2016 – already 13,42%, which is one of the highest in Europe.

It is estimated that approximately 5% of all the agricultural produce in Latvia is organic. Latvia’s entry into the EU in 2004 afforded it access to EU agri-environmental support payments for organic agriculture, which brought about exponential growth in the number of farms until 2008, and continued expansion of certified organic land area even after the number of farms began to decline again due to land consolidation.

Yet several key contradictions underlie this seemingly rosy picture of the Latvian organic sector. First, Latvian organic farmers received only a fraction of the subsidies, organic farmers in old EU states receive, and have had continuing problems implementing new bureaucratic norms of the EU. Not only the farms were the food is grown, but all facilities where food is processed or packaged after harvest, must undergo certification for the product to land on a shelf with an organic label, even domestically. This has resulted in a processing bottleneck, meaning that despite rising numbers of certified farmers and land area, comparatively little labeled organic food has been either sold on the Latvian domestic market of exported. In 2005 there were only eight small certified organic processing facilities in the country; hence the majority of certified organic food was either used for subsistence, sold as conventional, or fed to farm animals. Although there were more than one hundred processing facilities as of 2014, of the four main food categories produced organically, in 2017 only 39% of milk, 29% of potatoes, 57% of meat, and 32% of grains were sold as organic.

A sea of change came after 2010 with new direct-buying clubs in Rīga and other towns, organized by eco-minded consumers who place joint orders and coordinate distribution.