I sistemi agro-alimentari e le aree rurali: quali scenari?

The essay deals with the relationship among agriculture, bioeconomy, food chains and socio- territorial assets. In Italy, the activities defined as bioeconomy, often closely linked to global value chains, are based on modern forms of agriculture that require high consumption of external inputs (i.e. energy from fossil fuels). Bioeconomy strategies are based on agro-industrial monocultures, which entail heavy environmental impacts, and prolong the logic of industrialization of agriculture that in Italy had already established since the second half of last century. I am convinced that the bioeconomy is not the right solution for a necessary ecological and territorial rebalancing. Approximately 60% of the Italian territory is composed of inland rural areas that host only a quarter of the national population. Since the bioeconomy responds to the needs of economic growth but certainly does not aim to create jobs in agriculture, should we foresee a future of human desertification for the Italian countryside? The fundamental problem in my opinion is that the systems of production and consumption of organic matter developed in recent times tend to demolish and sometimes annihilate the agricultural relationship between society and nature, but I do not believe that this path can be considered the correct way to build a fair and sustainable future. The priority, rather than the needs of the growth economy, should be given to the basic needs of populations, and therefore to the production and consumption of ‘real’ food (healthy and rich in nutrients), to the recovery of appropriate forms of civic and small-scale agroecology, to eco-territorialist and bioregionalist transformations in the organizational models of local societies.