I still remember, with the nostalgia we all feel for childhood, my grandmother wondering, and asking my mother, what to make for lunch, what we would eat at lunch, tomorrow, for the coming feast day, for the rest of our lives. It is a constant of our culture, yet not, as I used to believe, a legacy of periods of undernourishment and of the struggle to put something on the plate: it is quite simply bound up with our animal instincts. Indeed, our well-fed household pets think first of eating and will bend to anything to secure that function, even though they have never suffered the pangs of hunger. So we too, like so many a Boby, Teo or Zara, are visited by this recurring thought which, instead of easing off with comfort, grows stronger into the need to find not merely something to put on the plate but something special, tastier, healthier, more nourishing, useful not only for carrying out our daily functions but able to keep us young, healthy and good-looking.

Now, through some strange mental path, these miraculous foods are sought not in the most advanced scientific laboratories but in abandoned fields, in the memory of the elderly, almost as if, in dietary terms, we came from a golden age rather than from an age of hardship, deprivation and diseases linked to nutritional deficiencies. And yet we find it easy to imagine that the farro our great-grandparents grew, the beans and grass peas, and that knobbly fruit riddled with parasites might help to improve our health and lengthen our lives, when our grandparents, who ate exactly this, died toothless and full of ailments at an age when we still play sport. Explaining this shared feeling is a task for sociologists, which we are not, but making a contribution to the knowledge of foods and ridding ourselves of many prejudices is what we mean to attempt with this short piece. Not long ago the Corriere della Sera devoted a whole page to the wholesomeness of maize polenta from organic farming compared with that from GM maize, with the opposing positions represented, for the pro-GM side, by Umberto Veronesi and, for the pro-organic side, by Mario Capanna. Even though common feeling leads us to regard organic farming as the healthier option, it is in fact its own products that stand accused of being vehicles of poisoning by harmful and carcinogenic substances[1]. This reversal of positions rests on the fact that organic crops, precisely because they lack the support of chemical plant-protection products, are more heavily attacked by insects which, by boring into the tissues, in turn create the ideal environment for the growth of fungi whose toxins (aflatoxins, fumonisins, etc.) pass easily into the food and thus to the consumer; the contamination of milk with aflatoxins is one of the most keenly felt emergencies in our veterinary public-health institutes, and unfortunately such substances have been shown to be powerful carcinogens. One is led to think that to demand organic food in school canteens may be an attack on our children's health rather than a protection, and this shows that the Precautionary Principle, so often invoked by the environmentalist world, knows no political camps. But it is better not to generalise, and to include among the possible causes of food contamination by mycotoxins other factors such as the storage of products, drying and harvesting. A recent television investigation showed how present these compounds are in pasta made from grain that was certainly not organic, imported from distant places and which therefore grew mouldy during its passage by ship[2]. Other television investigations have shown, and will surely go on showing, how treatments with plant-protection products can leave residues in food, perhaps each compound below the permitted threshold yet still producing toxic effects because of the presence of several compounds together; and this is to say that farming which resorts massively to chemistry is not the solution to the problems either. But let us begin at the beginning: what is the problem? The problems are in fact many. It is estimated that the demand for food will increase by 2-3 times compared with consumption in the 1990s between now and 2050[3]. At the same time, and probably at the same pace, much farmland will be withdrawn from the cultivation of food, whether because of suffocating urbanisation or because it is turned over to other uses such as energy, leisure, renaturation and reforestation. In the developed and more densely populated areas of the planet there is also a demand for environmentally sustainable agriculture, one that uses practices respectful of the environment and that, for this reason, in most cases reduce output per unit of land. Such a situation is borne at the expense of the large productive expanses located in those sparsely populated and poor countries which, in order to obtain investment from abroad, are willing to give up the use of their own farmland to the benefit of other populations (land grabbing). Given that land grabbing is not an acceptable solution and will not last indefinitely, we need to bring about a reversal of the trend both in our agricultural policies and in our lifestyles, a reversal that can be summed up in two essential points: the preservation and recovery of high-value agricultural areas, and research and innovation.

Notes

Sadly, leaning over the many railings of Umbria one discovers a landscape that has worsened dramatically: cultivated fields have been replaced by roads, industrial sheds that are often disused, large retail centres and, more recently, solar farms. Umbria, the "green heart of Italy", has become no more than a fine slogan, one that no longer reflects reality. This impoverishment of our landscape, which will have repercussions on tourism as well, can be explained only by the low, if not non-existent, profitability of farming. For now we feed ourselves cheaply by relying on imports that do not guarantee us quality, both because of production techniques that cannot be checked and because of transport and storage that certainly diminish the quality of the product. As consumption rises in the emerging countries, foodstuffs will probably remain largely in the areas of production, prices will climb, and to feed ourselves we will be forced to spend a great deal for a product of low quality; I do not know how easy it will be to win back for farming the land, the skills, the professional expertise and the dedication. We cannot, therefore, afford to lose such assets: to that end we must repay farming through the price of its products and, if that is not enough, through incentives for the protection of the landscape, but above all farming must find within itself the strength to sustain itself. The strategy Italy has chosen in every region is quality, where quality means the uniqueness of a product that cannot be reproduced elsewhere and that has characteristics of particular merit, the famous typical products which, through DOP and IGP and various certifications, manage to escape the price set on world markets and command remunerative prices. This entails certification costs, including the cost of the research needed to devise reliable certification methods, and it lends itself to fraud, because often the uniqueness of the product being traded is limited to its place of origin rather than to clearly distinguishable organoleptic qualities. In Umbria the main typical products are the Fagiolina del Lago, the Lenticchia di Castelluccio, the Sedano nero di Trevi and the Zafferano di Cascia; it is clear that such crops cannot meet all the needs of producers, since they are grown in small territorial enclaves and are in any case products with limited demand, so it is not with these that one can revive the agriculture of the region's main farming areas: the plain of Assisi, the Tiber valley, the Conca Ternana. In truth, typical products can hardly appeal to the country's great agricultural regions, the Po plain or the Tavoliere of Puglia, precisely because, to be typical and dear, a product must also be rare. The farming that counts is not done with these crops but with the widely grown ones: wheat, maize, rice, the potato, the tomato and so on, and it is these that most need to be encouraged and safeguarded.

[1] "Corriere della Sera", 9 October 2011, p. 29.

Commercial protection is the hardest aspect to achieve because, given the free movement of goods secured by the GATT agreements and the establishment of the WTO, there now exists for these products a world market that sets the price, and the Italian producer, faced with very high production costs, is forced to accept the world price, which proves insufficient to cover the bare costs of production; this is why farms close or convert to other activities and the agricultural land disappears, often in a way that can no longer be recovered. Protective action on such production can be of two kinds: affecting transport costs and setting very stringent limits on the quality of products. Obviously transport costs too are subject to international control and are in any case hard to increase because of the obvious inflationary effect, so the only method left for discouraging imports is quality control; the provisions on GMOs therefore seem to serve this aspect more than the health or environmental one. Yet they appear to have little effect if what the 2004 Nomisma Report states is true: on the basis of 2001 data, it explained how all DOP and IGP products used GM soya in a proportion that Nomisma estimated at 36%[4]. It would perhaps be more fitting and more useful to increase controls and thus turn back at the border those foodstuffs that do not meet standards of wholesomeness and quality, such as grains contaminated by mycotoxins, or olive oils with extremely high acidity levels before refining by local processors. A km 0 policy could be a great spur to agricultural production, but it needs measures and structures to make it workable; at present, instead, work is done solely to the advantage of large-scale retailing which, against a much-touted increase in employment, itself of a low level, consumes land and demands public investment in infrastructure. One aid to such policies may be the increase of crop profitability through innovations that reduce costs and raise output. Plant genetics could here play a leading role, provided that the use of advanced techniques, including transgenic ones, is accepted.

The fear of the transgene lies entirely in the "we do not know what we have cooked up", which in the first instance is untrue and in the second is true of all our activities. It is not true that nothing is known, because the advance of methods allows us to know a great deal about what we have done, that is to say: at which point of the chromosome the transgene has been inserted, whether and which of the plant's genes have been altered by the insertion, whether and how much the transgene is expressed, whether and how much other genes potentially involved with the transgene have been altered, and whether the proteins and plant substances accumulated in the plant have been modified as a result of the gene transfer. We also know that these are products by now used across vast areas of the world and that no harmful effects of such crops on health have ever been proven. As with all our actions there is a part that remains obscure, that is to say we do not know what we do not know, and so it might well happen that, just as with organic crops it turns out that they can favour the establishment of toxic fungal strains, so with GM crops too negative consequences, as yet unidentified, might be found. One negative consequence is certainly the resistance of such crops to a single herbicide, so that rotating different crops does not entail the use of different herbicides and encourages the formation of a replacement flora that is ever harder to eradicate[5]. Much more than a word should also be spent on the importance of the production methods of the techniques of organic farming: the respect for the production environment that this approach guarantees is a value not to be given up, and so protecting the water table from contamination by effluent, keeping the organic-matter content of the soil high and minimising the release into the atmosphere of potentially dangerous substances are fundamental values, for the achievement of which highly sound production techniques such as rotation, intercropping and so on are introduced or reintroduced. Unfortunately organic farming will not agree to incorporate into its rules the use of plants modified precisely in order to optimise these needs, plants that therefore produce substances toxic or repellent to pathogens, that increase the nutritional value of the product and so on. And above all it does not accept the method, regarding it as the offspring of who knows what Satan, with a kind of preconceived anti-scientific bias. As already noted, one may decline to accept some of the products of these technologies, as argued for the introduction of resistance to herbicides, indeed to a single herbicide, but the rejection of the method cannot be understood, for it is nothing other than the development and broadening of techniques already widely used, such as controlled crossing, interspecific crossing and mutagenesis. What ought instead to be fought is the narrowness in the number and type of transgenic products, the offspring above all of the control that a few companies hold over patents[6] that protect not only the products but also the methods of constructing GMOs, methods that are moreover the offspring of research begun and largely carried out at public institutions. Being free of the tether of patents would make it possible to apply such technologies to species of limited and local distribution as well, and thus to multiply many times over the transgenic organisms available. We could then have tomatoes of particular varieties, resistant to specific pathogens; we could adapt, as far as possible, the temperature requirements of a crop to the conditions of its own environment and so increase the cultivation alternatives of a given area, which, besides offering farming more chances of income, broadens the range of km 0 products and, not least in importance, increases biodiversity and the variety of the landscape. Even so, great as the potential of genetics may be, it is naive to hope that it can resolve on its own the many problems posed in order to ensure food security (food for all), which it is perhaps worth summing up: population growth, the reduction of cultivable land, the allocation of land to non-food production, land grabbing, and the financialisation of agricultural markets, which has led to price volatility and speculation [7] that offer no certainties to the small and medium producers, who are moreover the most significant in Italy and who are thus induced to leave the production system and reconvert. As said above, the issues go well beyond specifically agricultural themes and involve economic aspects of national but above all international policy, aspects of a commercial order, and also sociological and anthropological ones. We, in our small Umbria, can take only two actions, to conserve and to innovate: to conserve our environment, our farmland and our landscape and, at the same time, to innovate production, to add new crops to the already vast inventory of species that are grown, to add new lifestyles and new eating habits, above all to eat less and to diversify the diet. The European Commission has put three million euros on the table for projects studying insects as new sources of protein[8]. Why not?

[2] "Presa Diretta", Rai3, 9 October 2011.

[3] Bongaarts, J. (1996) Population pressure and the food supply system in the developing world. in "Population and Development Review" 22, pp. 483-503.

[4] Nomisma 2004 – Biotecnologie e Zootecnia. Scenari, potenzialità e ambiti di scelta per le produzioniitaliane di qualità.

[5] Chaudhry, O.(2008) Herbicide resistance and Weed-resistance management. http://www.weed-science.org/paper/Book_Chapter_I.pdf

[6] Jorgensen, R. (2007) The freedom to innovate: a privilege or a right? in "The Plant Cell" 19, pp. 1433-1434.

[7] Campli, M. (2011) La sicurezza alimentare: le priorità di una sfida antica e contemporanea, in "Agriregionieuropa" 7 (26), settembre 2011.

[8] Work programme 2012 (2011), Cooperation Theme 2 European Commission C5068 of 19 July 2011.

Francesco Damiani is a Researcher at the National Research Council and head of the Perugia Unit of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources.