After fourteen years, finally, the orange juice producer industry is remunerating the agri-food chain of “made in Calabria” orange juice.
The price per kg of oranges was 5/7 euro cents, completely insufficient to cover production and collection costs And which fueled an intolerable chain of exploitation that affected workers, farmers and processors attentive to respecting the rules. ORtoday it is between 35/40 euro cents, almost seven times more.
An certainly long journey which saw farmers and orange pressing plants as protagonists. This is what Pietro Molinaro, president of the anti-Ndrangheta Council Commission, states.
At the time, remember there was almost a demonization of this specific sector and the Rosarno revolt (7 January 2010) in some way certified this! The affair, he adds, caused considerable uproar throughout the country and also at an international level (Economist article) and since then a short circuit was created which generated the Law to combat gangmastering (199/2016), the restructuring of Producers’ Organisations, the modification, with Law n. 161/2014, of the rule contained in Law 286/1961, which raised the minimum percentage of juice in soft drinks from 12% to 20% to label them as orange sodas.
It was a regenerating period of legality for Calabria and Italy underlines Molinaro who combined social and economic justice identified with the claim “Let’s not leave Rosarno alone…let’s cultivate the same interests”.
It has been amply demonstrated, comments Molinaro, that it was not just a question of subsidies to farmers but a production system exploited by multinational drinks companies which mortified citrus growers; The conditions of a more transparent market call for the activation of irrigation of the over 1000 (one thousand) hectares underlying the Metramo Dam and a 100% Calabrian “Supply Chain Contract” using the resources provided for by law 101/2021 made available by Masaf for recover abandoned land and recover transformation activity. Technical support must be put in place in parallel (phytosanitary service, professional training and technical assistance with particular attention to precision agriculture) to support this 100% Italian food production chain.
Molinaro comments on these opportunities for development and real work, no one can leave the Piana di Rosarno – Gioia Tauro alone.
 in the Rosarno-Gioia Tauro plain, oranges for juice production have reached a fair price){kind=link}