Lecture by: Andrea Ferrante, President of AIAB

Lecture by: Andrea Ferrante, President of AIAB, the Associazione Italiana Agricoltura Biologica

This morning we will speak about organic farming. We will discuss what it means on a world wide level. We will also discuss the link between organic farming and food security, and the model of agriculture’s links to agriculture and food security.

We need to know: who is producing food on a world wide level? What are women’s roles in food production? What is the family farm model? (Which is more widespread in our Italian sector). Finally, we willdiscuss the future of organic farming, in both the south and north of the world. We will then discuss where we are headed. What should organic farming be in the future?

My personal background first. I am an agronomist by trade My wife and I have an organic farm near Bolsena, and we produce organic vegetables. We have a multifunctional farm. We don’t only produce vegetables but we also have agrotourism, restaurants, and so on.

What is organic? I think it is important when we discuss organic to discuss not only certified organic but un-certified organic. Organic is a model of production with a model that can be referenced on an international level at the International Organic Association. We are still a movement in organic. In the Infund definition, we are always talking about certified and uncertified.

We at AIAB often discuss techniques. We need to know how to grow and protect crops. We need a model in order to develop a new way to produce and a new way to consume. We need a new model of relation. Who produces and who consumes? The consumer in this sense is not only someone who buys something but someone who exercises their rights. These rights include the right to eat the kind of food they want, to live in the kind of environment they want, and so on.

It is clear in the organic movement that we have a very different position from the mainstream. When I talk about organic I have this model in mind. I have to be honest, it’s not the only way people see organic.

In the sense of this model, at the center is human beings. The human being is the farmer. This is crucial, because after the second World War, the know-how of the farmer was day-by-day exploited, and more and more substituted.

The know-how of the farmer was substituted with the know-how of the agro-industry. The farmer lost his capacity and his knowledge about the management of the land, making him only a worker with a technological knowledge. The farmer today often knows only how to put that kind of seed with this kind of fertilizer, only knows how to produce this plant which must be treated with this kind of herbicide. The farmer loses importance, as he, the human being, was originally the center of agriculture knowledge. He used to know what the soil was like, what was the biodiversity of his land, the micro-climates on his farm, and so on. This human knowledge is crucial in organic agriculture.

If you think as a community that this sense of organic farming is no longer important – the farmer is no longer the knowledge center, but only applying someone else’s technique – then that means you as a community are losing culture. You are losing a fundamental part of the culture of your society. In that sense it is important that organic is trying to change the patterns of reference of agriculture. What we as a world community did, from the 50’s and WWII onward, was the erasal of agriculture culture. We replaced it with knowledge far removed from the farm, and not owned by the farmer. Today, we have patterns of life, we have patterns of seeds, we have patterns of fertilizer. We have the privatization of knowledge.

When you are speaking about agriculture – with its 5000 year old history – we see that we have changed everything in only 50 years. Here's some data on our sector.

Certified organic farms account for 30 million hectares around the world. Of these hectares, the nation with the most organic land is Australia with a wide range of farms on 11 million hectares of land. Argentina, China, the USA and Italy follow behind. In Europe, we have 6 million hectares of organic certified land. In that sense, it’s interesting. This land is certainly certified land, but organic is much more then certified land. If you think about all indigenous people’s maintenance of the forest, the use of traditional African ways, the use of Andean systems and so on – these peoples are are still an organic model of production. It is important that we know that still, at the base of the model, are family farms.

Family farms still produce more food-for-consumption then any other system. The bulk of the world’s people eat from family farms. This matters, because we sometimes get the idea that the bulk of the world’s production is from the agro-industry model. This is not so essential in terms of food security . The real essentials of food security are guaranteed by these family farms. Half the world’s man power is linked to agriculture. Agriculture is still crucial to the world economy, and from the family farm model, the sense of the human being is retained.

From the agricultural policies we have discussed in the past 20 years, this is all linked to the trade in agriculture. This is then linked to the issue of fighting world hunger. We forget the bulk of production is by family farms for a local market, and we forget that family farms are also linked to an ecological mode of production.

This is important because when we think organic, we think of a model of production where the capacity to be more efficient is applied by family farms. When a farm is linked to the people at the center of the model, it is more efficient. Organic is only a mode of production. We don’t use chemical fertilizer, for example. It’s important that we stick to the family farm model, that we stick to the important role of the human being in the farm.

(One hectare is 2. something acres).

What is the minimum size of an Italian farm in Italy? We have one million six hundred thousand farms in Italy. That's a very big number for a very small country.

Family farms matter because at its center is the work of the family, although there can of course be some employees. The typical farm is linked by the family’s manpower. This is the most common world model. In the USA, for example, you have family farm networks.

How important is access to land? The debate about land reforms is a big deal. Indeed, an enormous debate exists about land reforms. Denying people access to land is a problem. In 2006, 27 years after the debate began, the Food Aid Organization has organized an international conference on land reform. It was the first time we had really talked about land reform in 27 years. It's an essential issue, but very delicate. We have two ways to see the problem: prioritization, and how we can ensure access to land for the poorest people.

Who is working on these farms, who is managing these farms, and who has the knowledge? Knowledge loss is the most important problem we face now. What happens when we lose the knowledge? In Italy, for example, we have pretty much lost our ability to make seeds at farm level. This is an essential loss in cultural and biodiversity levels. It means that all the seeds we use here are produced by the seed industry. The seed industry isn’t bad or good, but it does have to respond in a market oriented way to sell seeds. The seed companies won’t produce seed that won’t be good on the market. They will decide for you what you are going to eat. For example, all tomatoes found in the market today are linked to four, five, or six varieties. We have lost a huge capacity for agricultural biodiversity in tomato production, although we have had tomatoes in Italy for 500 years.

Why did this happen? Vegetable producers don’t do their own seeds anymore and only have a part of the growing process. They buy the actual plants elsewhere. Only a few organizations produce the seeds. This is not only a problem with the farmer but a problem with the whole of society. This comes back to the main issue: agriculture and food are linked to farmer’s problems. It’s a problem of the entire society. If you see what is the weight of agriculture and food on the international discussion - well, it’s a low priority.

How does organic play a role in the situation? It has a crucial role in letting people ask if the model we have chosen – the mainstream or agrobusiness model – is what we want. Our policies worldwide are based on an agrobusiness model.

In 1996 – 13 years ago – we had made more food available. In the 90’s, the UN organized all kinds of summits, including the 1996 World Food Summit. The world community said, at these meetings, that "We have a problem, we have 870 million people suffering hunger". The first of the new millennium’s goals was supposed to be addressing the world hunger situation. In 13 years, sadly, we didn’t even begin to address the tremendous problem of hunger. We now have one billion people in a hunger situation. It’s even worse then it was before all those lofty proclomations.

We have to ask ourselves if the mainstream model we have chosen is the model that can answer the hunger problem. One billion people still suffering hunger is pretty bad. We may be thinking on an organic and national level, but who’s thinking on an ecological level? We have to rethink the priority of our model of production and distribution.

We have to rethink our model and base it on a rights approach. Shoud there be a universal right to food? What is a right to food and how do you exercise it? What rights do we have to guarantee to people to get them access to food? If the bulk of these people suffering hunger have farms or are farmers, we will have to realize that the people producing food are the people affected by hunger. In that sense, we must review and rethink these models.

At the center of this model are organic family farms. The farmer has to have all the systems in hand, both production and distribution. You produce and you also process. All these free things have a very important role. In history, the bulk of knowledge was at the production level. Distribution was less important since the market was local. Then we have the important role of processing –when the agro-industry started to organize this in the 20th centuries. We saw a situation where farmers gradually became weaker and industry became stronger. Now, today, the bulk of the profit is in the distribution system.

Somebody else decides the price in agriculture, someone who is removed from the cost of production. Especially in the Northern part of the world, we don’t give much value to food. We don’t give food its real value, but we do think that food can arrive all over the world, and there is an enormous market for it. We need to start asking: what is the process of production, what are the costs of production? Much of our agriculture in the western world depends on migrants.

All the policies linked to millions are policies that avoid the stability of these people in their countries. They are working, but in principle they do not exist. It is clear that you will have more and more weakness from those kinds of workers. They do not technically exist, and thus they have no tribunals to help them, and no power to decide their salary. At the base of tomato sauce (for example) in a can, very often you have migrant workers. Before we buy we must ask: Who’s harvesting the tomatoes?

Perhaps someone paid 10 Euros a day who works 12 hours a day. This is by most definitions is slavery. But we want that tomato to cost very little, because we in the Western world don’t want to spend too much money on our food. Therefore, we do want a product that can only exist by way of slave labor. These are things we really have to start to think about. This is another problem linked to organic: we don’t have to have the standard (organic fertilizer only) but we do have to guarantee an organic farm cannot be staffed by slavery workers. This has to be the minimal requirements at the table.

Without this labor requirement, we cannot even discuss organic. We must claim another niche of the market – but a niche that is not technically organic and cannot be organic. More and more people are asking,"What is the origin of the food problem?"

The first question is personal health, which is big strength in organic. We can guarantee that in our produce, there will be no GMO’s, no chemicals, and nothing harmful for personal health. So many scandals are linked to the food industry and we are more and more aware of the process of production, and the dangers inherent in production.

We then have to ask, "Who made this food?" And what kind of work conditions did they experience? This is more or less the future. In the future, the woman as farmer plays an interesting role.

In the family farm based system, women play a crucial role, and the bulk of production is done by women. Women are central to this schematic. What is the added value? That is that the woman is the center of a trust system and the center of a trust based relation model.

When we are speaking about the ethical value of food, the role of the woman is becoming more and more important. Woman led enterprises and farms have a kind of perspective on the work that is based on the female role in society.

What are the main problems of the labor force in agriculture?

A family based model is becoming more and more important, and women are playing a role in the innovation of the model. In that sense we are seeing a transformation in society, especially in agriculture, in the role of women. This is very interesting. We now have a very different level of women's involvement from Africa to the USA. We are seeing women’s precedence all over the world. We have a more important role for women because we are trying to change the model, and we very much need women to be more central.

It is clear that we have many situations where women are used as slaves. But we have to see in which direction we could go. If we look forward, it is clear that the most interesting experiences give women a central role. If we go in that direction, women will be central.

So, we have an agrobusiness model that is based on trade, and a main agriculture policy that was formed by the WTO. That era is in full crisis. It hasn’t yet ended, but is in crisis. So it is clear for everybody that it is not trade that is the solution. There was a period in the last 20 years when we thought with trade we could solve all the problems, and that the main thing in agriculture was free trade.

We didn’t consider extension services and destroyed them, and we didn’t invest anymore in agriculture. If you see the amount of money invested in public aid from the North to the South, in the 80’s, 25 percent of it went to agriculture products. This trickled downwards, to only 3%. We that with a good trade policy, there would be a free market and we would solve the issue of the production of agriculture.

Now it is clear that the three big world areas – Europe, the USA and Japan – have strong internal agriculture policies. All the others couldn’t even think about these kinds of policies because their policies were free trade. This was not the solution, we finally realized. From last year – in the heart of the food crisis – we started to think about a new model of governing agriculture and food production in the food system.

The Rome international conference in June 1996 said we have to produce more food, but said nothing revolutionary. Then there was the G8 meeting in Tokyo, where people began to talk about the “global partnership," which would be a new model of rules about agriculture and food. This was not only the UN system (FAO, EFAD, World Food Program, so on) but could incorporate the private sector, the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions.

Finally, people began to think that such a "global partnership" on food issues was a good idea. There was another conference on these issues held in Madrid. We are now at this stage where we want to put everything back on the Committee of Food Security. In 1996 the center of World Food Security said that the FAO should monitor all hunger fighting policies, and should put together an agenda/plan of action (from 1996). This was used for 13 years, with little result other then monitoring.

The idea now is return to the Committee of Food Security, renew the Commitee of Food Security, and let civil society play a role. This is a major thing because it is the first time in the UN system that there has been recognition that a farmer’s association, trade unions, indigineous people, women’s organizations, fishermen, all of them - will play a role in new government policy. They will work with NGO'S and foundations to achieve their goals. They may not vote on these matters, but these small actors will definitely will play a role within government. So we realized that the solution can’t be found only between governments.

What we have done until now has given us no good answer. We must recognize we haven’t answered the big problem yet: How do we get food security? We didn’t get any answers in terms of rights or models of production. We must rethink the model of production and use the organic farm experience. It is possible to grantee food security with another model of production. The FAO website has recently had a very interesting conference and section on food security and organic farming.

The Food Security and Organic Farming conference at Michigan University, in the USA, did an important study showing that if all land in the word could be farmed organically, we could answer food security for all people in the future as well. One of the first things people say, when told about organic food in relation to food security, is that: "It's impossible to use organic farming to answer food security, organics are for rich people.”

This Michigan conference has shown this is not really true. An ecological model of production is sustainable for the South of the world, where the bulk of people live. You can use ecological production instead of agro-business. It is clear that family farms have to try to maximize the potentiality of the environment. Buying seeds and fertilizer is a source of debts. If you don’t produce and have debts, that’s a problem.

This model is also a diversification of risk, providing a big advantage. In this conference, there were interesting studies done in India and China on assuring food security with organic farming. In that sense, it is important to note there are a range of experiences that show another model of production and distribution is possible.

Where should organic go in the future?

Family farm models are important, but organic today means more then that. It is facing a big debate in this sector. In this big family of organics, we have different actors. One actor that is usually not as important in agricultural sectors are certifiers. Certifiers are usually a private economical body or company owned by a small (or at times bigger) stakeholder. They are a private company and play a major role in our sector. We have two things we are talking about in agriculture: agriculture isn’t very rich and most farmers are rather poor. So farmers have another big problem: they are rarely well organized. The Farmers Association is usually very weak, and even weaker in organic farming. Non-mainstream farmers find it hard to access the bulk of money in agriculture policies. The organization is weak.

On the other end we have the certification industry, which is one part of the model where there is money. A certifier is delivering a service to you, that in the North part of the world gives you access to the organic market. You are certified organic by this certifier, and thus certified and able to enter the arena.

Certifiers are specialized actors in organic, and don’t work in other sectors. So certification is a place where there is money and power. Another place with money is the distribution system. Historically in organic in many countries there were specialized organic distributors. Where there is commerce there is specialty, the question of how profit is divided. A big part of the organic profit is in the hands of the distribution system.

Distributors play a more and more important role in our sector, especially specialized distributors. In our movement, we have a great number of people that are the farmers and are not well organized. They do not influence policy as they should. On the other hand, we have the certification body, which is not a democratic organization but a private company owned by a stakeholder. They are very influential on other private companies and distributors.

So you have an odd situation, which is much stranger then in the rest of agriculture. In the rest of conventional agriculture, the Farmer’s Organization is much stronger and has direct access to a number of funds coming from agriculture policy that give them the strength to exercise their role. In conventional farms, you can have a quality scheme that are certified. Certifiers play little role in conventional farming and have little power over agricultural policy or standards. Theyy are only delivering service.

This is a major difference:

Where do un-certified farmers fit policy wise? Perhaps they have no money to pay for it, or choose not to.

Organic is an entire model unto itself. If farmers change their model of production, consumers will change their models of consumption. We at AIAB think of the association as a model looked at from all sides. We simply have to look at the association from all sides. At the same time, we at AIAB are known as a farmer’s organization, as a group that will represent the needs of the farmers. In organic, the farmer’s interests are the consumers interests.

Who has to lead the organic sector? Where should the organic sector go? It is clear we all have different ideas on that. We all share the method, which people are also talking a lot about. The world wide demand for organic products is growing every day. When we are in an economic crisis, this affects demand. Citizens have chosen organic using their conscience. Even if they have to spend less money in general, they will still spend on good healthy food and spend less in lower priority sectors. This means organic is not a fashion but a lifestyle.

When organic becomes a lifestyle for many, its popularity and preponderance will not change with economic crisis. It will mean you have built a real alliance between producers and consumers. It is difficult to change these things, of course. It's a process that takes time to arrive. Consumers demand their food comes from a high value process. It’s not just a pear. but a pear that is good for me and good for the environment, with an inherent ethical value.

In agriculture, we are changing our role in the society. We are not just producing beer, but we are also producing social benefits, and we are recognized by society for these social benefits. We have a generation problem right now. Farmers are aging and young people do not want to be farmers.They see the job as old-fashioned, or out of society. Maybe there is no future, and maybe you will never have young people interested in agriculture. But if you give farmers a different, central role in society, a society based on communication and the internet, networking, and so forth, then are not delinking the farmers from society at a whole. You are instead adjusting the center.

Giving the farmer a role of innovation, and developing a new relationship between producer and consumer, is essential. If you are at the center of the green economy, you are at the center of society. You are not just producing a pear. You are also providing a number of services to society, and are being recognized for this. The farmer’s role becomes not marginal but central.

Where is the knowledge? How crucial is the knowledge? The fact that organic food must be processed in a way that will leave more of the characteristics of the raw product matters. All the junk food we are eating today can be produced with any kind of raw material. It is destroyed and rebuilt, leaving nothing of the original. It is totally de-linked from production. As we are at the center of innovation, we are at the center of the process.

This is the worldwide discussion regarding organics. It is also a major debate in the USA. Organic milk is mostly produced on only two farms in the USA. Is this a good model? It means you are replaying the same model of agro-business, with a long chain and a concentrated process and production, where you have only the substitution of chemical means of production with theorganic means of production. Maybe you are answering the demand for healthy food, but are not addressing the other things we discussed this morning. You are concentrating production in a few farms, the distribution system in only a few hands, and so on.

In that sense, the big debate is: where does organic have to go? Will we in organics be just another agro-business label?

IFAP is now quite contradictory, as it has a farmer’s association from the South. But in the same organization, many things are quite different. The big wheat/cereals producers and others are more linked to family farms. Many African farmer’s associations are based on family farms. Via Campesina is more recent, having formed in the last 50 years, and is based much more on family farm organizations. It is much more homogenizes in its policies and is much more based in the South. So you now have a worldwide organization where the South is the leader. Via Campesina is a tremendous organization in India, Brazil, and Indonesia with millions of farmers – 400 million – as members. Traditionally, the bulk of farm organizations were part of IFAP.

If you want to do organic, the first thing you need is farmers and breeders, because without them, well, there's no farming! But at the same time, we are now taking in the dimension of the new idea of this movement – the ecological problem – with an answer that can really provide a world solution. You can find this experience with nomads in Central Asia. You can also find it in Indonesia, where people experienced a classic food security problem after the tsunami. On the one hand, the World Food Organization began flooding the area with food from all over the world, answering a terrible emergency. But this was done only in the coastal area of Indonesia, which is a 130 million person country with enormous food production potential.

Can we really address the hunger problem in a new way? Do we have the experience to do this? World farmer’s associations are saying, “Yes, we have the answer. Let us do our work.”

The G8 meeting, for the first time, had a section on agriculture and food. There was a meeting of the main African farmer’s associations. They produced a document that was very clear. It stated, "We have the possibility and the capacity to answer and demand food for Africa. But we need policy that makes it possible to do that." They were asking for policies, not money. They were not asking for food aid either. They were the farmer’s associations of Africa. They were not NGO's.

Organic must choose. It can have a future, if we stick always to the interests of the farmers. In that sense, the interests of the farmers are the interests of the consumers. If we stick to traders, the market related interests, more and more the standard will be weakened. A market driven approach dictates that you have to produce more at the least cost possible.

Another example: you don’t do monoculture in organic, as the rotation of culture being essential to maintain soil fertility. But the rotation of the culture is expensive, and if you want to produce at a low price, this careful rotation is against your interests. More people are asking for standards with less compulsory rotation. But if we weaken the standards, we will lose our ability to protect the environment and maintain fertility. People don’t understand consumer interest is going another way.

Consumers buying organic have very high expectations. Organics are a lifestyle You are changing your lifestyle and making an effort. You want the food you are buying to be made with the same effort you are exerting to change your habits. We in organics must stick to the high standard: with a high standard, after all, you can ask a lot from the other end. Without a high standard, you cannot ask. Being part of a community supported agriculture system – a CSA scheme – demands a lot of work from the consumer. It is easier to drive to a market, buy exactly what you want, and go back home. So you, as a consumer, are going to do something more difficult (with CSA's) that, in the end, gives you more.

If you are the farmer doing organic, you have to do a model that is difficult to do. We can’t say organic has to be easier then conventional production. If it is difficult, and it is, then it is crucial that we maintain the knowledge of the farmer. More knowledge translated into more farm efficiency. If the knowledge of the farmer becomes central, you cannot avoid the role of the farmer. A common notion today is that we can have food production sans farmers. Farmers and agricultural work are not the same things. A farmer is someone that has a farm, and with that knowledge arrives at food production.

An agro business systems involves someone with a technological package, and someone is applying that package to the land. This system is capital intensive and requires zero knowledge.

The biggest market for organics in Italy is school canteens. This is another model of production. The canteens are owned by the municipality, and are buying organics mostly at the local level. Beside tha, there is a good Italian network of direct selling, and a good specialized retail system. By the time you arrive at the market, third parties are maybe only 30% or less of the total share of food costs. This gives us democracy of the market in Italy. It means more choice, more opportunity, more stability, and more strength to the farmer’s side.

On the other end, it is clear that organic must always renew itself. We are always talking about climate change. I think that in organics, we are playing a very important role in this great debate. More fertility in the soil means the land is more of a carbon sink. In that sense it is important we are producing with less energy. One ton of cereals produced organically uses less energy then a ton produced by conventional methods.

I as the farmer have an important role in that sense. If I start to do a distribution model that makes this food travel thousands of miles to find a buyer, all these benefits become less interesting, but still important. A distribution system is linked to the local market. If I want to eat an orange I have to get it in Sicily. Coffee must come from somewhere else. We have to review and resettle the distribution system. Today, it is totally de-linked from production.

Sabrina Aguiari:

We need an alliance between consumer and producer, taking away the third party. We are trying to diminish the value of the “third man” or the salesman, the middle man. We don’t need the third in between liaison. If we envision this relationship in different terms – if we think of a scale. So maybe we organize a community that does visits, create a sort of permeability of the space of production by the consumer.

On the one hand is taste education, on the other is the education of other senses. It's a need to recognize food, and to accept that real food looks different. If we do better education on some basic knowledge, provide some basic reference as to what organic cultivation needs, people can get an idea if there is some astonishingly extraneous element in the way these things are produced. This came to mind when discussing a new model of certification: what can we do when we get back? How do we give more power to the organic producer?

We have seen that the USA organic market looks a bit like the market in the South (of the world). If it is true that there is a certification system in place, a system that has no connection to moralistic, organic frames – then that certification is irrelevant, and is not protecting the consumer.

Maybe US consumers can be clearly on this side.

Back to basics: Who is doing what? 80% of farmers are women, and farmers feed everybody. They feed not just the owners of the means of production,nbut also workers in agro-business. Since 80% of this farmwork done by women, we're seeing the long chain and theshort supply chain, like the lady in Bolsena who sells her vegetables illegally here in Italy. This has something to do with rethinking the model and putting the farmer back in the center. There is a shift, or should be. A new alliance between men and women must be developed. Women are not hijacked by the new movements for their work.

When farming became a heavy job, men stopped doing it, since they wanted to go into industry around 1900. Women took up the burden of keeping the family farm going while they did other work in the home. From that moment on, there were more female farmers then men. What does this shift really mean? Does this mean there are women in power as they control the means of production? The survival of that kind of culture of food? Or does this simply mean that women are formally the business owners, because farming is a low paying job, and men are the ones getting higher paying jobs in industry?

When you have a small business, you have less mechanical means and you do more by hand. Women use their hands more then men. Women often do the heaviest part of the job in terms of physical engagement. From the environment, the people, the national level – where do we stand in these terms? Are we really making a new alliance between men and women, or are we overlooking something?



We discussed how essential migrants are to agricultural business. Migration can be essential, in the case of Mexican tomato production across the border, in the USA. Agro-business knows no season, and tomatoes are produced all year round. You follow the sun and use greenhouses when you don’t have it.. Migrant workers are displaced, and work in agriculture without owning any land. Nomadic agriculture is indeed a new concept. What is the pattern of living and production that compels people who actually work with the land to move around to survive?

Europe doesn’t like migrants these days (if it ever did). We know these jobs are unappealing to kids. How do we keep food security in our borders? What is your feedback from the environment on these things – women and the position of migrants? Can you help us think of possibilities of actions we have as American citizens and consumers to contribute to building the lifestyle of means?

Andrea then talks about certification and other systems:

The participatory grantee system is going on all around the world. One of the things that it is linked to is the idea of action. The idea is to set together the PGS system all over the world. We want to do this in Italy as well. We want to have the experience of the participatory grantee system all over the world.

In Europe, we have a straight regulation on organic farming, that doesn’t allow certification beyond third parties. This will be a long process, because we must start with field experience, and then scale up those experiences to the national level, and to the European commission. We are working on that. These are things that can be done all over the world. North, South, no problem. This is a good action because you put together people, and are addressing the main problem. The problem being, of course, that of of how to put people together and talk on a dynamic, local level.

A pattern of women in the organization is imperative. There will be a much more important role for women in leading enterprises and assuming roles in the organization. There is till a lot of work to do, but it is adifferent way to approach things. Men tend to stick to the old rules of agriculture, and a higher percentage of women will work in alternative agriculture, and are more open to a moralist view. Women maintain the essential trust system in organic farming. They are more trusted then men in society. Women play an essential role in organics. This is something we have more work to do on, but it is important.


Migrants are the real problem here. We can’t have an agricultural system without migrants. Migrants assure us the bulk of the work in agriculture and organic farming. It is a system that needs human labor. You have more laborers on an organic farm then on an agro-business farm. We will demand more manual labor, and it is clear this will come from migrants.

Besides the young – we are addressing a lot to young people because we want to renew our farms with more young people – but beside that we will have a lot of migrants. More and more we are building new social cooperatives where, beside men and women working, we have people with disabilities, prison, handicapped, drug pasts, whatever. These new actors will have access to public lands. They often do have access to public lands and are usually not exploited. It can go to a social private organization, and it can become a social cooperative. They are playing an important role in creating new actors in agriculture.



Most migrants in Italy have no legal protection, and are clandestine. A lot of illegals are regularly paid, and the farmers would like a regular contract, but the law makes it impossible. To be regular you need to go back to your country, and you may only come back if you have a contract, and are within quotas. This system is almost impossible to put in practice. More and more with the economic crisis, migrant policies become more difficult, almost impossible to navigate.

Maybe in that sense we will guarantee migrant workers in agriculture because we can’t go on without them. People creating exclusive policy against migrants are the same people telling us how good Italian food is and so on. But they are forgetting that this Italian food is made primarily with manual labor from migrants. You need migrants for the food. We are a shrinking nation, and we are only growing due to migrants.