Mauro Corona: civil disobedience to guarantee a future for villages and agricultural territories

“In the villages, you lose services, population, economy. I have the impression that small communities no longer have a general interest in politics, which in turn has no interest in small communities. But if they were put together, they would create value and money. You can’t sacrifice farmers who make exceptional products because they don’t have tiles at 1.70 meters: there are stupid laws, to which, citing “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau, you have to rebel. I understand that Parmalat has to respect certain laws, but a small farmer has to be left alone, he cannot be hindered, they kill the farming communities in this way, from the sea to the mountains. Instead, we have laws written by incompetent people, who were elected more for sympathy than for their ideas”. Mauro Corona, writer, mountaineer and, above all, voice of the agricultural, mountain and sea communities, does not send them to say that, at WineNews, he talks about the world, and above all about Europe and an Italy, which are incapable, for many reasons, of protecting and defending that heritage without agricultural production .
“Europe doesn’t really care about rural communities and small villages, or about migrants. They have tried to create a united Europe, but there is a lack of details. It is useless to unite Europe in this way - explains Mauro Corona - we do not aim to act where needed but to act at a general level, while the real policy is a scalpel that intervenes in a precise manner where necessary. A small village like mine cannot have the same rules of a coffee bar in the center of Milan, otherwise, it is condemned to closure. And this, due to Europe’s lack of attention to the villages, the districts and the regions most in difficulty, was not the least understood, but that is where politics must intervene. The bureaucratic isues must be freed up, I aspire to entrepreneurial anarchy: if in a village there is someone who wants to open a bar, it must be left to open it in one day, other than paperwork and months of bureaucracy and costs. Instead, we make an equal law for all that cannot go well“. Europe is not the only problem because it is the economy of the earth that has been suffering for decades, as Corona still explains. “Countries still have resources to be rediscovered and recovered, products to be rediscovered and on which to build economies, but not with the aim of making money. You should learn to work the land to earn enough to live on, so there would be enough for everyone, and above all, you could work the whole land, not just that of the most profitable territories such as Barolo. I wrote a book, “The end of the crooked world”, in which I preach the end of oil, with people forced to invest in land and agriculture. Our food and our wine - says Mauro Corona - together with our views, works of art, culture, music, from Tyrol to Sicily, give a lead to everyone, only France can compete with us. If the Chinese come here, it’s because our food and wine are cutting-edge, and I hope the Italians will realize that. In the Nordic countries, they don’t have what we have, we could live on income if it were well administered”. And then, there is his latest book, in which “there are some chapters in which I talk about the products that the forest offers us, not only mushrooms and medicinal herbs, but also resins such as pharmacy, in the woods there is everything, but the multinational drug companies have annihilated these remedies, which were not placebo, but serious things. It’s not a nostalgic book, about what was better before, but about how the earth can give you everything to survive. Not only food and harmony but also medicine, there are at least twenty types of resin that have a therapeutic function. This does not mean going back to primitiveness, but saving traditions. I make sarcastic jokes about the fashions at the table - continues the mountaineer and writer - but I respect the choices of others. The real problem is that you eat too much and badly, there is no food education, neither at home nor at school. In terms of overweight children, we are reaching Americans. A correct diet taught in schools teaches us to put petrol in our bodies when we need it, not like today when the car is stationary”.
Finally, his direct but never idyllic and always critical relationship with politics:“capturing many insults, I repeat that I knew Salvini well before he became Salvini, but this government for agriculture did nothing. If Trump is still alive it is because he eats the products of the earth, such as bread and meat, which is why it is necessary to go back and invest in them, to produce food in a natural way. Here there are exceptions such as Petrini and Farinetti, and around the darkness. We need to educate to a civilization of the earth, as my friend Mario Rigoni Stern said, who wondered why at school they didn’t teach how to make a garden, no one knows how to do it anymore. In Milan, in some condominiums, they do the gardens on the windowsills, and it’s a good thing, an investment in health. But as long as the human being only does what makes him make money - concludes Corona - things are not standing”.