Agriculture resists in the year of Covid and in 2020 it records a decrease in the value of production by only 1% compared to 2019. This was revealed by the Continental Observatory on macro trends in the agricultural sector. According to the survey made by the brand that reference partner for the agricultural market, fruit and wine are fine, while some difficulties are recorded in the vegetable and oil sector. In the most critical year of the pandemic, then, the agricultural sector relaunches and in the first months of 2021 there is a boom in sales of agricultural machinery (+ 52.9%).
The value of agricultural production in Italy between 2018 and 2020 fell by 1.1%, from € 56.7 billion to € 56.1. The decline actually began in the first year, with a -0.3% in 2019 compared to 2018, to accentuate slightly with the arrival of the pandemic (-0.8% between 2019 and 2020. In 2020, at European level the Italy ranks third, after France (first with 75.4 billion euros of production) and Germany (56.3 billion euros).
Loading…
The weak point of the entire sector was vegetable production, which decreased by 8.8% in the two-year period, with an acceleration in this case in the last year as well: the variation went from -1.5% in 2018/2019 at -7.4% of the 2019/2020 vintage. Among the various productions, that of olive oil in 2018-19 had undergone an increase of + 51.6%, an increase that was transformed the following year into a -16.2%. It is a fluctuating sector in itself, given that it is a cyclical production.
Vegetables are also in difficulty, closing 2020 with a decrease of one third in production, to minus 29%. On the other hand, the trend of wine and fruit is different: in the first case, after a contraction of 20.4% in the pre-Covid phase, there was a growth of 3.5% the following year; for fruit, on the other hand, it went from a contraction of 2.4% in 2019 to + 14.8% in 2020.
Furthermore, in these two years, the continuous decline in livestock and the increase in livestock products has pushed livestock production to record an overall -1.9%. and livestock production) dropped by 0.9%: in 2018 it amounted to € 47.1 billion, in 2019 it rose to € 46.7 billion, reaching € 46.6 billion in 2020. A slight decrease also the part relating to services while agricultural labor, in the two years, fell by 4.3%.