In Umbria, as throughout Italy, organic farming has grown. The number of operators and the area under cultivation have risen since the European regulation came into force; after some uncertainty in the first decade of the 2000s, due to short-sighted regional policies, since 2012 the sector has been expanding dramatically, driven by rising demand and, at the same time, by the deepening price crisis in conventional agriculture. This is by now a structural crisis, whose analysis lies beyond the aims of this article, yet it deserves some serious reflection, because I have heard the word “crisis” uttered in every possible context ever since, more than 40 years ago, I first entered this world by enrolling in the faculty of agriculture in Perugia.

At national level, the most recent figures provided by the MiPAAF through SINAB (the National Information System on Organic Farming), relating to 2018, show a further increase in the organically farmed UAA (Utilised Agricultural Area), which has reached just under 2 million hectares, around 16% of the national UAA, with a number of operators approaching 80,000, that is, over 6% of all farms. This figure, besides confirming the sector’s growth, also shows how the average size of organic farms is on the whole larger than that of conventional ones, standing in 2017 at an average of 25 hectares. To this must be added that various studies show how, compared with conventional farming, organic farmers have a higher level of education, just as the presence of women entrepreneurs is higher.

Umbria is in line with the national figures, with a UAA farmed by organic methods of over 45,000 hectares, thus approaching 15% of its total UAA and recording an average farm size of 35 hectares, higher therefore than the national average. There are almost 2,000 operators, among whom the share of on-farm processing is growing (360), while there are almost 200 processing businesses and 10 importers.

The most popular crops, besides fodder crops, are cereals with almost 1,600 hectares, grain legumes at around 700 hectares, the olive, which exceeds 5,600 hectares, and the vine, which reaches 1,000, showing remarkable growth sustained by the market trends we saw recently at Vinitaly, where organic wine reigned supreme. Worth noting, too, are the more than 1,300 hectares of certified vegetables. This figure would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, given that in 2011 the area under vegetables was barely more than 300 hectares. Umbrian producers, too, are beginning to respond to the demand from consumers looking for organic, local vegetables, in a region where market gardening had been wiped out by tobacco, above all in the few areas suited to it. Fruit growing lags well behind, at just over 200 hectares. The livestock sector is still little developed, or rather, present but not certified within organic farms, because it has been all but forgotten by the RDPs, despite the fact that demand for organic eggs, milk, meat, cheeses and processed products is shaping the shift in consumer trends.

Who deserves the credit for this growth? There is no doubt: the credit goes entirely to consumers, who have changed their behaviour and their consumption patterns, turning to organic in search of guarantees and of health, for the environment too; in many cases alarmed by the data, for example, on the exponential rise of pesticides in deep and surface waters provided by ISPRA (the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research), or on the contested classification of glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, declared a “probable carcinogen” by the IARC (the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer).

Certainly not thanks to politics, which persists in keeping in the background the only part of the sector that is growing, along with a market share that has reached plus 20% in large-scale retail (GDO) alone. A glaring example is the RDPs (Rural Development Programmes) which, with rare exceptions, and Umbria is not one of them, are not working, essentially because of excessive bureaucracy and serious planning errors. Consider the design of the current programming, in which almost all the Regions allocated to measure 11, the one dedicated to organic, sums wholly insufficient to cover that growth trend in organic which all the studies, statistics and market research had long been confirming and, in many cases, insufficient even to maintain the status quo.

Umbria shines in this ranking of short-sightedness, having allocated to the organic measure only 3.7% of the funds, while in 2013 it had an organic UAA very close to 9%.

So for the first time we have skipped a call for applications, and there will be rankings, that is, farms left unfunded, with the dilemma of whether to give priority to those entering today or to those who have held on and are renewing their application.

To this we may add that this is the third parliament that has failed to pass a framework law on organic farming; that the Ministry’s calls for research in organic farming were frozen for over two years and, when finally issued, moreover on pedestrian criteria, the allocation rankings have still not come out; that there is an amendment agreed at the technical committee for organic on the “rotations decree”, inexplicably kept in the drawers of offices unable to grasp the difference between cropping cycles and main crops; a controls decree issued by Minister Martina at the end of the parliament which does not solve, but rather aggravates, the problems of the control system; and that the new European regulation is drafting its implementing decrees “without the knowledge” of whatever Government happens to be in office.

Meanwhile the market keeps growing at a double-digit rate, becoming attractive enough to change the market strategies of the large-scale retailers and the big brands, at first in search of communication strategies that would not “sully” their name with the word organic, then swept along by the choices of consumers, who forced them to speed up so as not to miss the boat, so much so that today we find the whole of large-scale retail and the discount chains carrying own-brand products and, on their shelves, Barilla Bio, Granarolo Bio, Fileni Bio, or a brand born for integrated-farming fruit and vegetables and forced to turn organic, like Almaverde.

Such striking growth is continually cited and made visible even just by watching the television advertisements, but it needs to be looked at carefully. The growth in area described above does not, however, keep pace with demand, thus opening a gap into which imports move. It is no accident that the growth also includes a 15% rise in those importing products, above all from non-EU countries, risking yet another missed opportunity to steer production towards the market.

Even though the market is growing and producers have grown used to reckoning with political incompetence and the disasters of the AGEA paying agency; even though consumers can no longer be swayed by the old, unscientific and repetitive statements that Senator Cattaneo, or whichever De Fez of the moment, periodically doles out in deference to their patrons and that the newspapers publish to please their biggest advertisers, an important change of pace is still needed, not least to prevent all the values bound up with the organic method from being erased in the name of the market.

Producers have no trained technicians at their side, because there is no Italian school of organic farming. Degrees, courses and master’s programmes in organic farming are practically absent from the universities, just as in secondary schools there is no dedicated teaching, and, most serious of all, there is no research to support production. This statement is also an answer to those who argue, opportunistically, that organic produces little and cannot feed the world.

An emblematic and telling example of science’s short circuit is seed. Organic farmers use genetic material selected to respond to the chemical inputs that the method, by choice and by regulation, does not use. Almost 70% of the seed market is controlled by the same multinationals that control the pesticide market, which are therefore certainly not interested in producing varieties resistant to adversity or capable of competing with weeds.

It is no accident that, within the organic world, a major strand of work is developing on participatory selection and on adapting seed to different microclimates, reversing two cornerstone concepts of the seed world. The first is that research produces a seed and brings it to the territory through the network of sellers; here, instead, research asks producers what they need, selects varieties and has them assessed by those who will have to use them. The second is that, in order to be entered in the variety register and therefore marketed, a variety must be homogeneous, that is, entirely uniform, and stable, that is, identical to the mother seed when reproduced. Biodiversity, the cornerstone principle on which the organic method is founded, can be neither homogeneous nor stable.

There is still a long way to go and a great margin for growth that will be filled once the obtuse ostracism ends against a method of production that makes products which are healthy and good for those who eat them, for the environment in which they are grown, and for the health of those who work.

Vincenzo Vizioli, an agronomist, graduated from the University of Perugia in 1982. A consultant for organic farms, he sits on the advisory technical committee for organic farming at the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies. He is also a member of the federal steering committee of AIAB (the Italian Association for Organic Farming), of which he has several times been president, and is currently president of FIRAB (the Italian Foundation for Research in Organic and Biodynamic Agriculture). He took part in the national commission on what counts as organic, defining production standards up to the entry into force of EEC Regulation 2091 of 1992.