As the cost of food shopping keeps rising, farmers are earning less and less. According to TerraComune, the system that has impoverished both people and the environment needs to change.
In recent days, in several regions of southern Italy, farmers have joined hauliers in protests against high fuel prices. The rise in diesel prices is one of the many difficulties producers have been facing in recent years, alongside soaring energy costs and fertiliser prices, and the threats posed by climate change. The market prices of some commodities, such as olive oil, have even made it more convenient for farmers to leave the harvest on the trees or in the fields rather than sell it.
The rise in food prices – which has increased by around 30 per cent between 2021 and 2026 – has not been matched by a corresponding increase in farmers' incomes. This is because it is not the farmer who sets the price of their produce, but the supply chain intermediaries, who offload cost increases onto the farmers themselves. To give some examples, according to data released by Slow Food Italia relating to a supermarket in the province of Cuneo, courgettes paid to farmers at between €0.65 and €1.45 per kg depending on the variety are sold at around €4 per kg; table grapes, paid at €0.62 per kg, are retailed at €3.49 per kg; bagged salad can cost between €10 and €20 per kg, compared with farm-gate prices ranging from €0.80 to €1.30 per kg.
"The dominant food systems are based on industrial and financial dynamics and, in the name of productivity and competitiveness – argues Serena Milano, director of Slow Food Italia – they exploit and compromise natural resources (soil, water, biodiversity), fuel waste, disregard consumer health, concentrate wealth in a few places (with many territories increasingly abandoned) and in a few hands, impoverishing both those who produce food and those who buy it." Slow Food denounces how increasing production yields and consumption continues to be the primary objective of agricultural policies, so that businesses and farms grow ever larger, while the number of small-scale farmers and livestock breeders who steward ecosystems and keep villages and social fabrics alive continues to shrink.
"Healthy, fertile land is the foundation of future agriculture and of our health, and should therefore be the primary objective of a broad and strong alliance between the productive world, consumers and institutions – Milano continues – Instead, the desperation caused by rising costs often leads to the paradox of an absurd clash between environmental demands and those of the rural world."
To drive change and respond to contemporary challenges, food and farming must be placed back at the centre of political and social debate: the TerraComune alliance, made up of environmental, agricultural and social organisations, proposes as a starting point the document "Un cibo che nutre un'agricoltura che cura" ("A food that nourishes, a farming that heals"), which brings together 90 proposals and 8 priority actions to transform food systems.
"Today we decide whether in twenty years Italy will still have farmers or only hillsides abandoned to collapse with every rainfall, and whether eating well will remain a right for everyone or become a luxury tied to economic circumstances – declared Fabio Ciconte, spokesperson for TerraComune – Food is not just any commodity, but the central issue of our time and it shapes the model of society we live in: redefining how value is distributed along the supply chain is no longer negotiable, it is a matter of democracy. If food costs more for those who buy it and yields less for those who produce it, then the question is not what the price of food is, but where the money we spend actually goes."
The priorities listed in the document are: investing in food security and peace; directing public funds towards agroecology; guaranteeing fair prices, decent incomes and the right to food by intervening in the distribution of value along the agricultural supply chain and through policies against food poverty; overcoming a model built on a race to the bottom that squeezes the earnings of producers and encourages the exploitation of labour; strengthening the bargaining power of producers, combating unfair practices and promoting commercial relationships that recognise the labour, quality and environmental and social value of food; giving territories the tools to govern food policies, from organic districts to school canteens; investing in research and training not only in agro-industry but in agroecology; broadening participation in food-related decisions to include farmers, cooperatives and consumers.
"The climate does not negotiate, soils do not regenerate within a single legislature, and a generation of farmers that leaves does not come back. We are not asking for funding for a utopia, but for people to look at what already exists in Italy and works: ethical businesses that pay genuine contracts, zero-kilometre canteens and land confiscated from the mafias that generates value – Ciconte continues – These are well-established experiences, some perhaps a little scattered, fragile, held together almost always by the stubbornness of those who carry them forward. The alternative to the agro-industrial model is not a theory, it is a daily practice that is simply waiting for a far-sighted policy that stops penalising it and keeping it on the margins." For TerraComune, the document provides a concrete basis for building political commitments, directing public resources and changing the rules of a system that has so far only impoverished people and consumed the soil.