Practicing Food Democracy to Shape Our Future

With these pages – Agroecology: the future of agriculture, Doppiavoce, Naples 2024, 106 pp., 15 euros – Gianfranco Nappi gives a nice gift to those who seek to understand the real processes that decide the present and orient the future, not only of the agricultural world. The author warns us from the first pages about the meaning of this book, not a doctrinal text, not "a treatise on agronomy", but rather a vademecum that helps to understand a world that, scholastically defined as "primary sector", has become over time a ghost of the stage.

AGRICULTURE , which represents the origin, the alpha of our civilization, crossed over time by great conflicts and changes, has become in the consumer society a commodity without social consistency, an almost neutral place, distant from the places of production and toil. The primary merit of this writing is precisely that of giving back social, economic and cultural centrality to agricultural production, to the food chain, to food and its organization. With great attention, with effectiveness and simplicity Nappi describes the mechanisms, the processes through which large companies, multinationals make extraordinary profits and impose their menu. A system capable not only of imposing, of exploiting in the most unworthy ways both man and nature, but also of plagiarizing, manipulating, bribing the same potential antagonists.

IT WAS SO IN THE STORY of the tractor movement, as Nappi rightly points out, a movement that came into conflict with the voracity of the agro-industrial system, which had the great merit of bringing agriculture back to the center of interest and political news, and yet at the end of the story the strength of that movement proved to be a precious ally of the agro-industrial complex, useful in hindering that same ecological transition that is beginning to assert itself in the European Commission's own declarations. Nappi rightly points out that «the Green Deal itself is fragile in the face of the rise of interest groups and sectors in difficulty», as the recent tractor story well demonstrates. The Green Deal is the other big issue that links the pages of the book.

OR THE IDEA THAT an ecological transition is UNthinkable without the awareness of how fundamental the production and consumption of food is and how decisive the role of the agricultural world and consumers themselves is. Fundamental, because the soil, like a sponge in its laboratory of life, retains and uses twice as much CO2 as is in the atmosphere, because intensive farming – 80 billion units that exploit two-thirds of the Useful Agricultural Surface – is “an ecological bomb”.

AND WISELY THE CONTRAST to intensive farming is the first of the ten points of the popular initiative law of Campania that has been waiting to be discussed and approved for years. To radically change this narrative, both the function and role of the agricultural producer and a radical change in the quality of food demand are crucial. We can talk without rhetoric about the need for a real revolution that radically changes both the production system and the lifestyles of the citizen-consumer. A revolution that has as its condition the presence of "peasants" in the countryside and at the same time a real leap in their accumulated knowledge that requires "data sovereignty" and the availability of new and sustainable technologies.

A REVOLUTION THAT MUST take food away from the world of goods, from the dominion of profit and from commercial speculation. For this process to begin, a reversal of the European Agricultural Policy is essential, which means the centrality of small and medium-sized businesses, the priority of quality agriculture, the prominence of producers and consumers, and finally a clear conflict with those centers of financial power that have transformed "food security" into a shrine to profit and goods. In this process, one can read that breviary of radical changes that Nappi with a happy expression calls "Food Democracy" that introduces the last chapter of the book: "It is not true that there is no alternative".