Gianni Fabbris and Adriano Noviello are on their ninth day of hunger strike in Rome, in a camper in front of the main entrance of the Ministry of Health on Lungotevere Ripa. Since April 17th they have only been able to eat a cappuccino as well as drinks with supplements. With the hunger strike, on behalf of the interregional breeders’ movement which has been mobilizing for years to change the failed strategies of public intervention on zoonoses and to relaunch the farming systems damaged by this failure in Sicily, Campania, Calabria and Puglia, they pose two demands. precise: a meeting with the Ministers of Agriculture and Health and the guarantee of the appointment of a national Commissioner.
Yesterday Fabbris and Noviello distributed request documents to Parliament, the interested Ministers and the Party Secretaries together with the buffalo mozzarella fruit of the work of farmers and artisans from Caserta. Today they return to address them with a message reproduced in full below: “Now that everything is clear to the country and the institutions, no more answers in political jargon. The crisis for farmers in the South is worsening with drought, collapse in the price of milk and meat, increase in production costs; Politics cannot continue to delay solutions.”
The failure of the eradication plans for BRC and TB is the fault of the regional and national institutions which amplify and aggravate the problems in Sicily, Campania, Calabria and Puglia. In these regions, due to the direct responsibility of provisions which have not been able to resolve the problems of zoonoses but have contributed to reducing the livestock population by half, the herds cannot be moved from pastures without water and fodder towards summer pastures and are suffering ( where is animal welfare?); many farmers in these regions, forced not to move their animals, are faced with the choice of buying hay produced in Northern Italy and water sold by private individuals, paying prices that are impossible to sustain, or of culling the animals by closing the stables and wiping out the herds. Transhumance (declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO) is compromised, leaving large areas of the country increasingly abandoned and affected by fires and instability.
In areas of excellent production such as, for example, that of the production of Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, ineffective and unsuccessful procedures and practices are imposed on farmers (which cost them hundreds of thousands of euros without this solving the zoonoses rather) which apply the correct scientific indications as in the rest of the world where the problems have been solved. Buffalo farms are in grave danger; after almost 50% of the stables in the Caserta area alone closed in ten years due to the failure of the eradication plans of the Campania Region, today they are all at risk due to speculative actions that profit from the price of milk at the farm gate (around 15% in less than last year) while alarm rises over the risks due to the importation of milk and curd with dubious controls.
The Mediterranean buffalo breeding farm is declared a national heritage by law and should be protected by institutions, not compromised.
The farmers have asked for a meeting with the Ministers of Agriculture and Health to compare solutions. Two of them, Gianni Fabbris and Adriano Noviello, have been on hunger strike since April 17 to ask for a meeting and guarantees on the appointment of the National Commissioner for BRC and TB, the first step to address the relaunch of the sector more comprehensively. Today from the garrison in front of the Ministry of Health in Rome where the ninth day of the hunger strike is taking place, the question to politicians is clear: is the meeting taking place or not?”
