Agriculture and Food Supply Chain in Covid-19 times
Contribution from Minister Teresa Bellanova on the Enea Magazine
“When there are more women managing resources like forests, there is an increased focus on their conservation. And this is important with a view to sustainable development ". I open my short contribution on how agriculture, sustainability and innovation are, and increasingly will have to be, closely intertwined, with the words of the great Indian economist Bina Agarwal. They return a truth that takes root even stronger in the experience of these dramatic weeks in which the world is measuring itself with the pandemic from COVID-19 and in which, everywhere, agriculture and the food supply chain confirm their essentiality, strategic nature, their being inhabited, in large part, by women. What I consider, together with the new generations, the most extraordinary and powerful factor of innovation that you can count on in agriculture.
If it is true that nothing will be as before, this is a point that political choices will have to contemplate. The economic and social agenda of our country, like the European one. Once again putting the food supply chain at the center as a supply chain of life and declining sustainability in its key aspects: environmental, social, economic.
Agriculture can and must participate fully, as a protagonist, in the green future announced by the European Union ".
Thus, the editorial of Minister Teresa Bellanova opens on the magazine Enea Energy, Environment, Innovation, with the theme "Cultivating sustainability". Which, underlining the resilience of the food supply chain in these dramatic months experienced by Italy under the sign of a world pandemic, notes: "The pandemic strongly highlighted the theme of food supply and the need, for everyone, to have food, healthy and safe. Guarantee of food supply and the fundamental role of agri-food systems are essential. Today, as never before, the function of the CAP therefore returns to its origin and there is an urgent need for an extraordinary plan for European agriculture with extraordinary resources. We need innovative tools, different from those activated in the past in the face of natural disasters or market crises. A common intervention strategy to consider and indeed anticipate, with convincing and effective answers, the different scenarios in the medium and long term. … It is in this system scenario that, and it cannot be otherwise, a punctual reflection also on the intertwining of agriculture, innovation and sustainability. Access to food, guarantee of supplies, quality and food safety, protection and safeguard of the territory and landscape, protection of extremely precious resources such as soil, water and air are revealed with indisputable clarity which are strongly interconnected ".