Lollobrigida: “the alarm for health warnings on the wine label has been temporarily pushed back”

“The alarm for the health warnings on the wine label, raised by the EU green light to the Irish proposal, may have been temporarily postponed, waiting for a rational definition of correct information, which puts citizens in a position to know that an excess of wine, like any other excess, is indeed very dangerous, but also that drinking consciously, in modest quantities, can have beneficial effects”. Francesco Lollobrigida, Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, spoke to WineNews from a meeting in Confcooperative Fedagripesca, where the cooperative system asked the government for a pact to save Made in Italy excellence. “I wish and hope that it will be as they tell me, i.e. that, after the postponement of the Nutriscore issue, this health warning has also been postponed”, said Minister Lollobrigida, also anticipating that “in the next few days, important news will arrive on the issue labeling, and a law is being worked on, very quickly, on the issue concerning the marketing of synthetic meat”. All arguments obviously dear to cooperation which, as Maurizio Gardini, president of Confcooperative recalled, “represent 1/4 of the value of the excellence of made in Italy agri-food. More precisely, the cooperatives produce 60% of the wine production, 70% of the dairy production, over 40% of the fruit and vegetable production, and 60% of the poultry and rabbit products”, recalled Gardini. Which, therefore, has lined up the woodworms that erode the competitiveness of a sector that affects 15% of GDP: dumping and undeclared job, with on the one hand many companies that respect the rules and on the other those who don’t; the dizzying inflationary spiral of energy and raw material costs; the lack of professional figures; the Farm to Fork and the Community regulations on sustainability which ask companies to turn around too quickly without accompanying measures, and while the EU market is regulated, agricultural products are imported from countries where DDT is still used; the Nutriscore towards which the Cooperatives reiterate their firm opposition because it trivializes and penalizes the Mediterranean Diet; Italian sounding, which weighs over 100 billion euros on the sector. Carlo Piccinini, president of the agricultural federation of cooperatives, Confcooperative, which represents over 3,000 agri-food and fisheries cooperatives with a combined turnover of more than 32.6 billion euros, requested that the Ministry of Agriculture “be a promoter of a strongly critical position towards the latest regulatory proposals of the European Commission, regarding the reduction of phytosanitary products and the reduction of plastic packaging, as well as those which tend to penalize the wine and meat supply chains, without making a distinction between moderate use and abuse of products considered harmful to health. The Ministry of Food Sovereignty - added Piccinini - is called upon to protect our agri-food system with strength and decision from all those initiatives that disregard in-depth studies of the impact on the production system and which, without taking into account the growing difficulty in which our companies find themselves operating, they risk having incalculable consequences on the security of supplies”. Finally, President Piccinini requested that public funds allocated to the agri-food sector be directed towards specific production realities that invest in Italy, generate local satellite activities, and sell products that are the result of a truly all-Italian supply chain: “in our opinion it is desirable that at least the resources under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry actually go to reward those who can boast the made in Italy brand, taking advantage of the traceability tools available today to attribute the made in Italy to only production processes in which the Italian origin of the production factors is guaranteed and certified, starting from the raw material up to the transformation. A concept so relevant for our economy and so precious for the Italian agri-food fabric must necessarily be valorized and assisted by economic policy interventions”.