SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

Mafia’s grip on Italian food ‘jeopardizes safety’

Italy's leading agriculture industry association on Wednesday launched a drive to root out mafia infiltration which is costing the sector billions of euros.

Mafia's grip on Italian food 'jeopardizes safety'
Mafia groups made €14 billion agricultural rackets in 2013. Photo: The Ewan/Flickr

"The agriculture and food sectors have become priority investment areas for organised crime groups," said Roberto Moncalvo, head of the Coldiretti association.

He called it "a strategic move in times of crisis because they have understood that, as bad as it gets, nobody can do without food."

Coldiretti estimates mafia groups took in around €14 billion last year from agricultural rackets, an increase of 12 percent from 2012.

According to the anti-mafia unit in Rome, around 15 percent of turnover in the agriculture sector is linked to criminal activities.

Coldiretti said crime groups "control in many regions the distribution, and sometimes even production, of milk, meat, mozzarella, coffee, fruit and vegetables."

They also run around 5,000 bars and restaurants – from pizzerias to ice-cream parlours – in Italy, mostly under dummy corporations.

The industry association said gangsters use extortion and intimidation to gain monopolies over products, force farmers to sell at low prices, as well as pressing businesses to buy their items and launder money.

Crime groups also tamper with ingredients and illegally butcher meat, it added.

Tampering with ingredients or swapping them for inferior ones in food then sold throughout Italy and Europe "seriously jeopardizes the quality and security of products," said Coldiretti.

The association noted a 14 percent increase in food safety alerts since the start of the economic crisis, to 534 warnings last year.

The initiative includes a group to help implement better monitoring of farm and food safety, as well as aid investigations into criminal infiltrations and contraband products.

Coldiretti said it would also produce a yearly "agromafia" report and collaborate with national and international anti-mafia organisations on breaking the grip of criminal groups on the agricultural sector.

Don't miss a story about Italy – Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

FOOD AND DRINK

French and Italian wines set to lose out to British vineyards, claims study

English wines could benefit at the expense of French and Italian vines as climate change shifts the landscape in traditional wine growing, according to a new study published on Tuesday.

French and Italian wines set to lose out to British vineyards, claims study

Increased heatwaves and erratic rainfall could wipe out vineyards from Greece to California by 2100, researchers found – while creating optimal conditions for wine growing in the UK and other unlikely regions.

“Climate change is changing the geography of wine,” said Cornelis van Leeuwen, the lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment.

“There will be winners and losers,” he told AFP.

Researchers compared existing but scattered data on the effects of rising heat and drought, as well as changes in pests and diseases, on global wine regions.

They found a “substantial” risk that 49 to 70 percent of these producing regions would become economically unviable, depending on the extent of global warming.

“You can still make wine almost anywhere (even in tropical climates)… but here we looked at quality wine at economically viable yields,” said van Leeuwen, a professor of viticulture at Bordeaux Sciences Agro.

Conversely, 11 to 25 percent of regions where vines are already planted could see production improve.

And completely new vineyards could emerge at higher latitudes and altitudes, researchers said – including southern regions of Great Britain where viticulture is in its infancy.

The extent to which global temperatures rise will make the difference.

If warming remains within two degrees Celsius of pre-industrial averages – a limit set by the 2015 Paris climate accord – most wine regions will survive, but need to adapt.

But under “far more severe warming scenarios, most Mediterranean regions might become climatically unsuitable for wine production”, the study found.

About 90 percent of winelands in coastal and lowland parts of Spain, Italy and Greece “could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century.”

Southern California, where conditions are already warm and dry, could suffer the same fate with suitable areas for wine production declining by up to 50 percent.

But warmer conditions in America’s northern wine regions, from Washington State to the Great Lakes region, and even New England, could see the potential for premium wine production to flourish.

While “France is not the most exposed country”, van Leeuwen said, it like many other wine-growing regions will have to adapt by using more resilient grape varieties like Grenache for reds or Chenin for whites.

But he cautioned against turning to irrigation.

“Irrigated vines are more vulnerable to drought if there is a lack of water,” he said, adding it would be “madness” to direct such a scarce resource toward such hardy crops.

SHOW COMMENTS