Agriculture and social organizations

Agriculture and social organizations

The undeniable social, environmental and climatic emergencies that characterize this historical period require a change in the rules of politics and economics; a tension which has been addressed in recent times by the efforts of both the United Nations, with the various intergovernmental conferences and, above all, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the strategy, better known as Agenda 2030, launched in 2015 by 193 countries, and the European Union, with its 2019 Green Deal.
Among other things, in 2020, with the Farm to Fork strategy, the EU proposed a great objective, with steps to 2030 and 2050 which, in simple words, puts the way of producing food and consume it, considering, with good reason, how central this aspect will be in a future perspective of integral ecology.
The Farm to Fork strategy is, in summary, a program which, in addition to the ecological sustainability of food production, also places emphasis on three other issues:
– food losses and waste prevention;
– sustainable food processing and distribution;
– sustainable food consumption.
Totally related topics and sectors, so much so that the agroecological objective cannot be addressed and reduced only to the production of food but to all the interconnections between this process and the connected inputs and outputs, which must not be addressed only from a technological point of view but primarily cultural.
The centrality obviously remains that of the production of food or other services that move synergistically with the rules of the ecosystems and those habitats in which the agricultural companies exist; a sharing of rules and principles that places agricultural systems and ecological systems in perfect dialogue and not in opposition.
In this sense we must emphasize an aspect on which, not infrequently, the so-called ecological transition places insufficient attention; the ecological transition, in fact, is not just a question of an energy nature but it is the passage or, if we prefer, the passage from that model of liquid society, as defined by Zygmunt Bauman (1925 – 2017) and liberalist to an aggregate, founded, among other aspects, on a circular economy.
It is impossible to build an agroecological system without intervening on all the contradictions and negative impacts on the environment and society caused by so-called modernity.
In this context, the two fabrics, the rural and the urban, will also have to undergo a structural reorganization, a rebalancing of their evolutionary dynamics.
Agroecology and territorial reorganization are two inseparable processes. As in an osmotic process, the exchanges and interactions between the way of producing and distributing food, together with a circular reconversion of the entire economy, will contribute to redefining the relationships between rural territory and inhabited centres.
This process will have to rebuild a reciprocity that avoids the continuous growth of large cities and the emptying of small towns and internal areas.
Among other things, the principles that inspire modern planning theories must follow design lines consistent with the principles of sustainable development and environmental protection, both in an attempt to put a stop to anthropisation, whose frenetic expansion is transforming irreversible natural systems, both in an attempt to improve the quality of life of present and future generations (Bissanti G. et al. 2021).
The limit of current Western civilization has in fact been that of often addressing ecological issues with a purely technical and sectoral approach, often neglecting the complexity of the ecosystem rules and processes at play.
Suffice it to say that today, in Italy (as happens in other European countries), according to recent ISTAT data, there is an imbalance in the distribution of the population, with two million unused houses in 5,627 villages, increasingly empty and depopulated.
If we want to make the osmosis between the natural and human ecosystems harmonious, we need to stop the depopulation of internal areas, promoting and activating a series of policies that favor this inversion.
In fact, while enormous urban suburbs continue to be built, in the last 40 years there have been as many as 2000 small towns that have lost 80% of their population, and among these 120 have lost 60 to 80%.
ISTAT tells us that as of 31 December 2020, the population of internal areas is on average older than inhabited centers (45.9 compared to 45.3 years), in the outermost municipalities the population is on average 46.9 years old compared to 44.8 years in the belt municipalities (Bianchino A. et al. 2022).
The old age index in the internal areas is significantly higher than in the centers (196.2 and 178.8), in the outermost municipalities there are over 223 elderly people for every 100 young people. It is the municipalities in the belt that register the lowest degree of aging.
Between 1951 and 2019 the population of the centers grew on average by 5.1‰ in Italy and by 4.8‰ in the South.
The Internal Areas of Southern Italy, however, have lost 1.2 million residents (-2.5‰ on annual average; Italy -1.6‰) and one municipality in three has systematically lost population since 1951.
Over the next 50 years, based on the “median” forecast scenario, a gradual but continuous decline in the resident population is expected. Future births will not compensate for future deaths and the migration scenario is positive but uncertain.
The average age will increase constantly, in 50 years the population of the South will be significantly older than the North and the Centre.
For municipalities that fall within internal areas, the demographic condition appears even more unfavorable.
The share of Municipalities with a negative population balance in the decade rises to 95%, recording an overall population reduction of 9.6% (10.4% considering the South alone) (Bianchino A. et al. 2022) .
Ultimately, we need a national measure against the abandonment of homes in small towns and rural areas, to prevent the ecological, hydrogeological and social disruption that will involve us more and more, regardless of where we live and what we do. Just think, among other aspects, of the proliferation of summer fires that are increasingly linked, not so much and only to the phenomenon of global warming, but, among other factors, to a process of emptying of rural areas and their care and maintenance, which which was implemented over the centuries by rural populations.
It is necessary to activate policies that place at the center all those internal, peripheral, rural, mountain municipalities of smaller demographic size, which however cover, by extension, 54.1% of the total surface area of the peninsula. Areas that present advantages for the quality of life of citizens, which ensure, through the care of residents, the protection of nature as well as the protection of the land and the conservation of the landscape.
According to some statistical and economic projections, the set of these positive externalities for the environment, the so-called “ecological services” are worth at least 93 billion a year, almost 5% of the GDP.
If populations are not rebalanced and connected, with their territorial biodiversity, with their peculiarities, traditions, and so on, it is not possible to rewrite an ecologically correct future history and, therefore, free of all those distortions that have led us to a increasingly poor humanity in an increasingly degraded planet.
In this sense, new rules must be established between production and use, through exchanges and connections based on minimum entropies both from a spatial, ecological and energetic point of view. Remember that each mass requires more energy to be transferred, the greater the distance to travel.
A relationship of the greatest possible proximity must be established between the production of food and other agroecological services and the places of use of these goods, otherwise the efforts to obtain energetically and ecologically efficient production processes will be constantly undermined by a discordant and unsuitable.
Likewise, the need to safeguard the integrity of foods, which travel greater distances, requires greater use of conservation materials, refrigeration, preservatives, etc.; factors which then require higher energy inputs and the release into the environment of by-products (CO2, plastics, various materials, etc.) whose recovery and recycling leads to further increases in entropy and therefore loss of energy potential at a planetary level.
From this brief analysis we can understand how the problems of planning policies and the agricultural and forestry territory of our countries have long been neglected, or treated with a sectoral perspective, outside the complexity of ecosystem principles.
Complexity that derives from the fact that the rural territory is, at the same time, an environmental system to be protected, a production system and a settlement system.
Each of the three systems has its own needs, which must be made compatible with each other.
Obviously we need to find new responses to the emergencies of land consumption, emptying of marginal areas, erosion of resources, etc., so that the future generation of transformation plans and projects can read, with a more integral and systemic vision, the objects and territorial systems, in order to highlight their values, roles, potential, vulnerabilities and connections. The new sustainable planning guidelines indicate the need to consider the environmental and agricultural systems as decisive components in territorial transformations. An agricultural company is not just a cell that produces food or other services, but also an entity that affects the landscape, biodiversity, historical-architectural and rural heritage; it is a biological unit of a much larger fabric that can no longer be relegated only within the boundaries of the agroforestry territory.
The same considerations apply to the design of environmental, ecological, landscape and naturalistic contents that can be identified in ecological networks, understood as a paradigm of social and environmental sustainability (Agostini S. et al. 2010).
The very wording of General Urban Plan, which underlies the planning of municipal territories, contains in its very definition a conceptual error, giving prominence to the word urban planning and risking, despite all the recent changes, putting at the center of planning values and contents that amplify that planning dichotomy between city and countryside, further widening the imbalance between these two territorial areas.
Planning must be moved to an integral ecological sphere, where the correlations between the social ecosystem and the ecological ecosystem are analyzed and planned and, in this sense, the analysis of the connections and influences that the agroecological transition process will bring about in the rebalancing and relationships between city and countryside.

Guido Bissanti