Biological Agricolture: an opportunity for economic development and protection of the environment

Biological agriculture has proved to be a model of alternative agriculture, able to promote correlated mechanisms such as public health and protection of the environment. At the same time, it offers the chance of economic development, especially for places not so adapted to intensive specialized cultivations and it represents a factor of re-balancing of demand and offer of agricultural products and protection of the environment and rural space The strong interest shown by consumers towards biological products clashes with high prices at the moment of purchase, and especially with limited visibility of the product at normal places of sale. All this tends to strengthen the average consumer’s belief that biological products are for the elite and for people obsessed with natural foods or for a social class of people who want to be different from consumers of mass products. However, the style of food consumption is slowly changing, and so is the consumers’ attitude. They are more and more careful about the quality and “naturalness” of the products, and do not consider the price as the only determining factor when buying a product. At present, the European Union is favourable to biological agriculture and to extensive cultivations, and its aim is to increase the biological surface by 30% by the year 2010. In this work, we emphasize the efforts made by the biological sector to significantly increase development in order to involve greater numbers of consumers operators and institutions.