Inside the European Union, the agricultural realities are different across the different countries, considering their particularities related, for example, to the socioeconomic, climate, and soil conditions. In these frameworks, Portugal has specific characteristics for several agricultural activities, including organic production. This chapter analyses producer prices in the Portuguese organic markets. Statistical information was considered from the SIMA (Sistema de Informação de Mercados Agrícolas) database for the weeks from 2017 to 2022, specifically for the producer prices of blueberries and strawberries across the different Portuguese regions and markets. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine on these Portuguese markets seem irrelevant in some cases and temporary in other cases.
TopIntroduction
The concerns with the environment and balanced lifestyles increased the interest of several stakeholders in sustainable agricultural practices (Das et al., 2021), since the eighties (Farias et al., 2022), agroecology (Johansson et al., 2023) and agroforestry systems (Cechin et al., 2021). This context promoted also organic farming practices (Blume et al., 2021) and curiosity about their dimensions (Bonnel, 2022). Among the organic practices appear the use of organic waste as fertiliser (Cruz Nieto et al., 2022) and conservative techniques (Naveen et al., 2021). This interest encouraged the scientific community to produce insights (Hidalgo et al., 2022) and knowledge (Loebnitz et al., 2022) about these topics.
Despite the growing trend (Shahabi Ahangarkolaee & Gorton, 2021), including in East Asian countries (Wang, 2021), in some cases quickly (Zollo et al., 2021), the organic markets represent a small part of the food supply (Carmona et al., 2021), meaning that there is some way to run, where the extension services (Sarker, 2021) may have relevant contributions. The wine sector is an example where there is still potential to grow (Hauck et al., 2021).
These activities are alternative to conventional productions (Khoso et al., 2021) and may bring relevant potentialities and opportunities to the farmers (Allison et al., 2021) and the food industry, including dairy producers (Badruddoza et al., 2022). Organic grain production, for example, is fundamental for the food industry (Han & Grudens-Schuck, 2022). The organic supply provides healthy and eco-friendly products (Antiushko et al., 2022) with mitigation of carbon emissions (Gualtieri et al., 2023) and soil quality preservation (Phillips & Heins, 2022). This occurs because, for example, the restrictions on the use of chemical inputs (Benzing et al., 2021).
However, the discussion about organic farming regulations is still open (Bulut et al., 2021) worldwide (Esteves et al., 2021), including in the dairy sector (Dimitri & Nehring, 2022). The same debate happens about some informality in these frameworks (Buquera & Marques, 2021), consumption motivations (Mai et al., 2021), attitudes and intentions to buy (Nautiyal & Lal, 2022), competition and coordination (Nematollahi et al., 2021), practices (Olejar et al., 2021), safety (Saleh et al., 2023) and the certification systems (Iannucci & Sacchi, 2021). Some consumers report higher trust in the certification systems of their countries (Murphy et al., 2022) and prefer to buy the national products (Rojík et al., 2022).
The prices and the quality are among the main determinants of organic food consumption (Radojević et al., 2021) in certain circumstances (Bilous et al., 2021), as well as environmental protection, ethical values and health consciousness (Diagourtas et al., 2022). Nonetheless, these markets are not immune to the current international crises (Andrusenko et al., 2022), such as the Covid-19 pandemic (Buraczyńska et al., 2022).