BARI – “For over two years, practically coinciding with the explosion of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the war on Italian wheat also began. The cereal market has been invaded by enormous quantities of wheat that Italy imports increasingly massively from countries that produce with food safety standards and costs that are decidedly lower than those respected by Italian cereal growers.
All this has contributed to the collapse of the value recognized to our producers for durum wheat and the elimination of profitability for farmers. We are facing the worst situation for Italian cereal farming in the last 20 years. For this reason we believe that further postponing the activation of the Telematic Registry and the entire package of measures envisaged by Granaio Italia is a huge mistake on the part of the Government. The true, total and real traceability of the wheat produced and imported is a tool in favor of consumers and producers, because from it derives the controls necessary to prevent unclear speculative maneuvers which are at the origin of this crisis situation”.
On the occasion of Durum Days, an international event on durum wheat which is held annually in Foggia and brings together all the components of the supply chain, the president of CIA Puglia and national vice-president of CIA Agricoltori Italiani, Gennaro Sicolo, returns to the issues that mobilized the organization with national petitions, street demonstrations and mobilisations, and a platform of proposals and structural measures from which it is necessary to start again to relaunch the sector.
Wild imports without adequate controls, unfair competition towards Italy from many foreign countries, skyrocketing production costs, drought, inadequate policies of the Italian Government and the European Union: “All this”, explains Sicolo, “has determined a perfect storm from which there is no way out, also due to the surrender of politics to the lobbies that rake in growing profits at the expense of cereal growers, that is, to the detriment of the first and most important link in the supply chain.
If things do not change quickly, we will have a further contraction in sowing, a decrease in national cereal production which will weaken the true Made in Italy of the wheat-pasta supply chain, fewer guarantees of quality and food safety for consumers and a growing dependence on foreign production . These are all factors that diminish our food sovereignty. Factors that need to be addressed and counteracted forcefully and through effective measures at both national and European level.”
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