Presidium of farmers and breeders at Pirellone this morning, organized by Coldiretti, against the massive presence of wild boars in the area. The damage caused in one year amounts to at least six million euros wild boars in the Lombardy countryside with assaults and raids that destroy crops, production, pastures, and force farmers to intervene to restore what has been ruined, periodically work to carry out maintenance on the instruments installed to try to stop the raids, as well as deal with losses in production, market shares and profitability.
This is what I estimate Coldiretti Lombardy on the occasion of protest in Piazza Duca d’Aosta in Milan with a thousand farmers who gathered in front of Palazzo Pirelli, headquarters of the Regional Council, to denounce a situation that is causing health, social, economic and environmental problems.
“The objective of the mobilization in Milan – declares Gianfranco Comincioli, president of Coldiretti Lombardia – is to immediately apply at a regional level the measures envisaged by the inter-ministerial decree launched last year for the adoption of an extraordinary plan for the management and containment of wild fauna”.
At the garrison in the Lombardy capital – explains the regional Coldiretti – an exhibition was set up with some of the agricultural products most attacked by these ungulates: from hay, the quality of which is compromised by the coming and going of these animals on the meadows, to corn, whose sowings are decimated if not eliminated; from potatoes to small fruits that are sought after as food, but also rice that is crushed by their passage, vineyards where the smaller plants are uprooted while the ripe fruit is eaten. Damage is also recorded in olive groves – explains Coldiretti Lombardia – with wild boars digging near the roots of the plants, compromising their stability.
These animals – continues Coldiretti – upset the environmental balance of vast territorial ecosystems in areas of naturalistic value and do not spare the dry stone walls, the art of which has been recognized by UNESCO as an intangible heritage of humanity. Without forgetting that wild boars have a fundamental responsibility for the spread of African Swine Fever (PSA), the disease, not transmissible to humans, which endangers pig farms and with them an entire sector which in Lombardy boasts excellent production such as DOP Varzi salami, Brianza salami and Cacciatora salami, local specialties such as traditional Cremonese salami and play a fundamental role in the creation of great samples of Made in Italy such as Parma ham DOP and San Daniele DOP ham.
