Skyrocketing raw material prices and record energy costs put Sardinian agriculture in difficulty, especially fruit and vegetables, but also pig and dairy cattle farmers. To these critical issues are added the increasingly heavy effects of climate change: in a few months we have gone from drought to too much rain, and now to ice and the absence of rainfall.
"An expensive price effect that is affecting the whole national territory - explained the president of Coldiretti Sardegna Battista Cualbu -, for this reason, for days like Coldiretti we have been planning a mobilization to support above all those sectors, such as fruit and vegetables, pork and dairy cattle, that despite the increase in production costs they find themselves selling their products at the same prices as in previous years, at times, and this is the unsustainable paradox, even at lower prices. In the next few days we will be in front of the prefectures to express this unease ”.
EXPENSIVE PRICES - According to the trade association, the high prices that are falling on the business world are causing production costs to skyrocket, with electricity growing day by day, registering record increases. To these are added those of diesel and feed (around + 40%). Increases that the agricultural world pays at the source but which are often not reflected downstream, when it brings its products onto the market, such as cow's milk sold on average at 35 cents per liter.
The pig sector is also one of the most penalized by Covid: "While the selling price of meat has dropped by 15% - said the breeder Pierluigi Mamusa - production costs have increased by 400%".
DROUGHT - According to Coldiretti, for cereal growers, the vintage is partially compromised. First the delays in plowing due to the too arid soils, then from November they had to stop due to the intense rains and today they find themselves in the paradox of starting the irrigators for the fields sown due to almost two months without rainfall and on the other have a part of land still inaccessible to tractors because it was soaked by the extraordinary quantities of water that fell in November in which there was + 45% more rain than the average of the thirty years 1981-2010, which classify it (November 2021) at the tenth position in the historical series of the wettest months of November.
For artichoke growers the losses are around 70% of product and 55% of turnover. The artichokes have rotted and asphyxiated in the field having remained soaked for too long. Now the nightmare is called instead frosts that risk burning the flower heads.
The same situation applies to all other field products, asphyxiated and often not cultivated due to the climate that does not allow cultivation or the hardness of the earth due to drought or too much rainfall.
"The high prices added to the effects of climate change are violently knocking down the fields and bringing our agriculture to its knees - said the director of Coldiretti Sardinia Luca Saba -, a situation that is now unsustainable and not aided by an elephantine bureaucratic system that is enemy of businesses. There are many companies that have not yet received a euro from the infamous drought of 2017, despite having applied regularly with a lot of certification in the field of losses ".
“We have expressed this discomfort to the Region several times and last Wednesday during the hearing with the group leaders we also delivered a document articulated with various proposals - added Cualbu -. The Region must intervene by guaranteeing immediate liquidity to farms by releasing those practices that have been inactive for too, long, starting with the shameful history of the drought in 2017 ".
(Unioneonline / F)