NO TO REWILDING YES TO DEFEND THE ENVIRONMENT AND PRODUCERS

Coapi “We are the custodians of the Land, the Sea and Nature”. In Abruzzo initiative on “No to rewilding – Yes to the protection of Nature and agro-pastoral activities” within the framework of the “99 days to save agriculture and fishing” campaign and after the definitive approval of the EU Regulation on Nature Restoration

Sulmona, 22 June 2024. The Coordination of Italian Farmers and Fishermen (Coapi) opened in Sulmona the five-day program of initiatives dedicated to the “Right to produce and environmental rights”, an opportunity for reflection and a proposal that is most appropriate in the aftermath of the definitive approval of the EU Regulation on Restoration of Nature

The Sulmona event, centered on “No to rewilding – Yes to the protection of Nature and agro-pastoral activities”, opened with a demonstration in front of the operational headquarters of the Maiella National Park in Sulmona and continued with a meeting at the Hermitage of Sant’Onofrio, opportunities to define the contents that will contribute, at the end of the mobilization days, to composing the chapter dedicated to the environment of the final document of the #99days mobilization campaign

Inside the garrison, at 12, the press conference was held which began with a minute’s silence as a sign of mourning for the tragic death of Satnam Singh in the countryside of Latina and of Pierpaolo Bodini, who died yesterday in the countryside of Brembio in Lombardy, to testify how farmers who are fighting for agroecology and food sovereignty as tools to affirm environmental justice are the first to demand respect for the dignity and rights of work (of labourers, farmers and artisanal fishermen) as first guarantee for the respect of social and economic rights.

In the press conference, Coapi reiterated that the protection of the natural environment cannot result in a “mummification of the territory”. Hence the firm no to Rewilding, “an anti-historical idea, which does not take into account the presence of man as part of the natural environment and his ability to manage, maintain and live in it”. Very topical objectives in Abruzzo, where coexistence with three national parks (Maiella, interregional of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga) and the Sirente – Velino regional park is becoming increasingly complex, due to the growing constraints that they actually limit the construction of a healthy balance between human activities and nature.

After the protest, in which several people took part, the initiative moved to the drafting of a document of proposals (which will be included in the general document of the #99days campaign) to the Hermitage of Sant’Onofrio, a place of high value symbolic desired by Pope Celestine V, who inhabited the Maiella in harmony with nature, the first to build a mountain management path.

Dino Rossi of Cospa Abruzzo declared in a press conference: “Today’s demonstration in Sulmona is a prelude to a conference that we will soon hold in Pescasseroli, at the Tana del Lupo, headquarters of the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park. The question we want to ask is that today we have two species in danger of extinction, the bear and the shepherd. Why in these long years has the species threatened with extinction (Marsican brown bear) always consisted of the usual 50 specimens, while so much money has been spent by the Park without actually managing to protect the species? We ask for a bear-friendly Park, because this plantigrade unfortunately enters into food competition with deer, which move in herds of up to 400 specimens, and wild boars, which are now everywhere, populations of ungulates which today, precisely because they are not managed, they nullify any form of protection for the bear itself. All of this, while the Park wants to include civic uses in the protected areas, a real expropriation, in places that have always been dedicated above all to grazing, and at the same time it asks the farmer for a complex, expensive procedure with a very strong and unreasonable bureaucratic burden such as the environmental impact assessment to authorize him to graze and to keep the farm itself.”

Andrea Marsili, from Cospa Abruzzo, underlines: “The Maiella Park is a UNESCO geopark, the presence of hominids has been witnessed in these territories for practically always, but today depopulation seriously threatens the presence of man. An accelerating process driven by ever new environmental constraints; More and more papers and bureaucracy are needed to graze the sheep, a form of blaming the human presence which is now overflowing and unjustified: we have always maintained and looked after the territory.” Marsili underlines the need for a dialogue that has so far been lacking with the park authorities, in order to “Participate in the drafting of the regulations and regulatory systems, this is what we want to implement, through an action that we intend to develop along the entire Apennines starting from contribution that we will give today from the Hermitage of Sant’Onofrio. Because we must avoid the dynamic before our eyes that seeks to block human history in these territories. We want to stay here with a new agriculture and a new pastoralism”.

In Abruzzo, at the time of transhumance along the sheep track L’Aquila – Foggia there were between 2 and 3 million sheep, in 2017 the sheep remained at 200 thousand units, today there are 150 thousand, a sign that the entrepreneurial activity armory risks disappearing, with all its productions.

Alessandro Novelli, GPS Interregional Network instead addresses another topic, that of carbon credits: “As farmers we produce much more oxygen than we consume with the production of CO2, but the European legislation to allow us access to the carbon credit market as sellers , wants our companies to perform even better and therefore asks us to make further investments where farmers’ ability to invest has already been reduced by the ongoing economic crisis. On the other hand, the industry that buys our carbon credits and which has large amounts of capital has no incentive to actually reduce its emissions, which will contribute over time to making the climate and the practice of agriculture increasingly difficult and risky.” From here Novelli concludes: “Even the transfer of carbon credits today by us farmers to the industrial sector presents itself in the long term as a form of financialisation of the present and above all future environmental damage that we suffer and will suffer; an illogical market, whereby any profits today consume the only real capital that every farmer has: arable land.” This is also a theme that is strongly posed in view of the drafting of the Coapi environmental document.

Gianni Fabbris, spokesperson for Coapi concludes: “With our initiatives we want to avoid a now real risk: within the next 20 years 2/3 of the Italian population will live in cities, and only 1/3 will reside in rural areas. But what use will rural territories be at this point, places where only wind farms can be cultivated, given that food production will have been abandoned? They will remain only to be visited on weekends by tourists coming from wild and inaccessible cities but where food will no longer be produced, whose production will be delegated by financial capital to distant places devastated by intensive, extractive and industrial methods. A scenario that we do not want to come true and that we intend to avoid.”