Udine has become the most transgenic province in Italy. There is a small handful of farmers who insist on planting unauthorised and illegal transgenic maize. Previous analytical investigations have established that, due to the irreversible contamination they cause across all agricultural areas, those who have introduced GMO cultivation on their land subsequently find it impossible to produce crops that are effectively free of them.

The State Forestry Corps is trying to remedy this situation by acting on behalf of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Udine: this weekend it seized the land in the municipality of Colloredo di Monte Albano (Udine) where transgenic MON 810 maize had been planted. The mechanical destruction of all GMO plants sown across 6,500 sq m lasted throughout the weekend. The destruction proceeded slowly and with great care because the Forestry officers found numerous metal nails driven into the plants, which can damage the machinery. Both those who rented the fields and the farmer himself are under investigation, as a press release from the National Command of the State Forestry Corps is keen to specify.

Since 2013, the State Forestry Corps has been conducting significant operational activities aimed at monitoring fields sown in Friuli Venezia Giulia, ascertaining GMO pollen contamination of conventional crops, and enforcing the national legislation prohibiting cultivation, both on its own initiative and on behalf of the Udine Public Prosecutor's Office.

The Udine Public Prosecutor's Office and the Forestry Corps are applying the criminal provision established by legislative decree no. 91 of 24 June 2014, which introduced new criminal law provisions for anyone who violates the bans on (GMO) cultivation, under which they risk imprisonment of between six months and three years and a fine of between €10,000 and €30,000.

The European Council of Ministers recently decided that each European Union country will be able to choose whether or not to cultivate GMOs on its own territory, adopting the choices it considers best for enhancing and protecting the quality of its agricultural output — both conventional and organic — which is in many cases of undoubted world-class excellence. Italy does not want them.

To provide an effective response to the need to safeguard its own types of agriculture and to protect citizens, the Italian government first adopted the interministerial decree of 12 July 2013 by the Ministers of the Environment, Health, and Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies, which provides for an eighteen-month ban on the cultivation of the transgenic variety Mon 810, and subsequently completed the regulatory framework with the adoption of legislative decree no. 91 of 24 June 2014. With this legislative decree, a specific criminal provision punishing violation of the ban on cultivating GMOs was introduced into Italian law for the first time, thereby establishing the offence of cultivating GMOs. It follows that it falls to the Regions to define, within their own territory and on the basis of findings made by Judicial Police authorities, the methods, timescales and measures that any offenders must adopt at their own expense in order to remove the prohibited crops. "The current regulatory framework," the State Forestry Corps press release concludes, "aims to guarantee the protection of the quality of national agri-food production — an excellence of made in Italy — which, at this time of severe recession, represents one of the few domestic sectors bucking the trend and contributes not only to the social and economic stability of our countryside but indirectly also to the balanced hydrogeological management of our territories."