San Marino. San Marino farmers worried about the future of the sector
“The high bills affect the entire supply chain, agricultural activities, processing, distribution and transport”.
Thus opens the joint note of the San Marino Agricultural Producers Association and the San Marino Direct Colatori Association, which specifies: “The significant increase in energy costs heavily affects the budgets of farms, already in difficulty due to the increases in production costs. offset by adequate sales prices. The prices of raw materials, from fuels to packaging, up to the various components of technical vehicles are all growing sharply, as are those of agricultural machinery and spare parts.
The diesel fuel necessary for the various cultivation operations has had a price increase of about double. The cost of fertilizers due to the increase in the cost of the gas used in the production process has risen enormously by about 200% !!!. The increase in costs also concerns the feeding of livestock, corn, soybeans, field beans have undergone an increase of 100% last year, the sector is in great difficulty also due to the risk of not being able to guarantee the ration to the livestock due to lack of raw materials.
The food sector is perhaps little taken into consideration but which feeds us every day and which cannot and must stop because otherwise we would die of hunger ”.
As always, continues the note, “the agricultural sector of San Marino maintains that the first function of agriculture is to produce food and we share what was stated by the Undersecretary for Agricultural Policies, Gian Marco Centinaio, at the inauguration of the Sigep” Italy returns to being a country producing agriculture “.
Farmers in San Marino are doing it, but every day they have to fight against climate change and expensive energy. It is a completely different sector from that of the past. Even recent. This was marked, as in many parts of the world, by the increasingly frequent climate crisis, the economic crisis, and in recent years the health crisis has overlapped. Supporting the local economy means supporting the country’s economy, environmental protection and our historical memory.
And today both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine remind us that every state should pay particular attention to the production of food ”.
The first field to be plowed, the Associazoni conclude, “are prejudices, so that the farmer’s work has the right recognition and the guarantee of income from a sustainable perspective”.