Floriana Fanizza gazes desolately at her celery crop, lost as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown meant it could not be harvested.
Italian farmers are being brought to their knees by a six-week lockdown aimed at stopping a the epidemic. They are also going through a drought caused by the driest spring in more than half a century.
Border blocks, restaurant closures and a lack of seasonal workers mean nearly four out of 10 businesses in the fruit and vegetable sector are struggling, according to Italy’s biggest agricultural union, Coldiretti.
Photo: Reuters
On the Fanizza family farm in Fasano, a town near the Puglia coast in southern Italy, some pickers, fearful for their health, stayed at home as the country went into shutdown at the start of last month.
That meant there were not enough hands to harvest the celery and turnip crops, which were ruined. The clock is now ticking on seeding vegetables for harvesting this summer.
“To sow properly, we need seven or eight people,” 41-year-old Fanizza said. “We hope we’ll be able to find them, otherwise we will have to reduce production.”
About 350,000 foreigners are usually employed seasonally in Italy’s agriculture sector.
The pandemic means that this year there is a shortage of between 250,000 and 270,000, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture said.
The production crisis could affect food availability.
Italy’s agricultural sector is the third-biggest in Europe in terms of overall value — it was worth 56.6 billion euros (US$61.5 billion) last year — after France (75.4 billion euros) and Germany (57 billion euros).
With Romanians alone accounting for 110,000 of the country’s 350,000 foreign seasonal workers, Rome is in talks with Bucharest over “green corridors” to ease movement between the two countries.
The virus is not the farmers’ only problem. Italy is also experiencing its driest spring in the past 60 years.
It has seen just over half its usual rainfall since the beginning of the year, weather experts said.
“It hasn’t rained for a long time and the land is arid, especially for wheat,” Fanizza said. “The situation is critical, we need to irrigate our fields.”
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