Three Italian DOPs come together for a cultural and social defense operation of the dairy sector, and of the world of breeding and milk processing. They are Casciotta d'Urbino PDO (Marche and province of Rimini - Emilia Romagna), Piave PDO (province of Belluno - Veneto) and Provolone Valpadana PDO (Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, autonomous province of Trento). PDOs play a key role in the panorama of Italian and European Made in Italy with a production value of around 5.2 billion and 8.6 billion in consumer value, according to Ismea Qualivita data. Furthermore, PDOs, as highlighted at the "Cheese Generation" conference yesterday afternoon in the Montecitorio press room, are very important for the protection of environmental sustainability but today they find themselves facing fundamental challenges to avoid the dispersion of value and wealth and the drastic depopulation of territories .
The choice to present this collaboration at Montecitorio is not accidental: the law for the promotion and development of youth entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector was recently approved here, of which Mirco Carloni, president of the Agriculture Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, is the first signatory: a reform which allocates 156 million euros from 2024 to 2029 and 27.76 million per year from 2030. The law aims to promote and support youth entrepreneurship, under 41, in the agricultural sector and relaunch the production system with interventions aimed at encouraging the establishment and the permanence of young people and generational turnover in the sector.
"The desire to get involved and the skills of young people are the way to recover efficiency and competitiveness in the primary sector - said the president Mirco Carloni - For this reason the Law provides for a series of measures such as a facilitated tax regime for the first establishment of youth enterprises in agriculture, concessions on the purchase and sale of rural land, the granting of a contribution, in the form of a tax credit, for expenses incurred for participation in training courses, tax concessions for the expansion of cultivated areas and a right of pre-emption in disposal and leasing procedures. The objective is to enhance the agricultural companies in the internal areas, where the PDOs are the maximum expression for protecting the cultural identity and development of those territories".
The union of the Consortia of Casciotta d'Urbino, Piave and Provolone Valpadana takes place under the aegis of Aecis, the European Association of Culture, Innovation and Sustainability, whose main objective is to take up the challenge of the transition towards sustainable food systems, as also indicated by the EU "Farm to Fork" strategy at the center of the European Green Deal.
The Casciotta d'Urbino Dop Consortium is part of an integrated agri-food chain project, founded on the values of cooperation, "which aims - stated president Gianluigi Draghi - to make livestock farms efficient and innovative as well as to keep them in the territories and consequently preserve employment, because if the companies remain, the services remain alive, from social, health and cultural to digital ones. Thus cooperation becomes a driving force of activity in areas that would risk disappearing. Agricultural companies in these territories Furthermore, they carry out a fundamental function of monitoring and defending the soil against threats from hydrogeological instability phenomena".
While Modesto De Cet, president of the Piave Dop Cheese Protection Consortium, recalled that "the province of Belluno is experiencing a double phenomenon of depopulation due to the demographic crisis and the important migrations outside the province in recent years. The presence of related production activities to the Piave PDO supply chain has significant importance in this socio-demographic context: it keeps the presence of man active and allows generational turnover, improves the otherwise slowly deteriorating landscape context and keeps the delicate mountain ecosystem in balance. safeguarding comes together a series of good economic, cultural and social practices: first of all guaranteeing a decent income for farmers, the promotion of ancient local traditions and of Made in Italy throughout the world".
The Connessioni del Provolone Valpadana (Con.Pro.Va) project started in 2023, in collaboration with Crea (the research center of the Ministry of Agriculture) and co-financed by the Lombardy Region, with the aim of building a detailed database of all the consumption of the supply chain, starting from the field, to record the energy impact of the production of milk certified in Provolone Valpadana, up to the maturation in the dairy. The project aims to create, with the support of artificial intelligence, predictability in consumption, in order to be ready in times of crisis, to be able to intervene promptly to correct any critical points. "Today - underlined the president of the Provolone Valpadana Protection Consortium, Giovanni Guarneri - the great challenge is to make this data productive by generating useful information within the farm and throughout the entire supply chain".