The minister in Verona for the inauguration of the event: “It’s not demeaning, I say this to anyone who is on the couch and takes the benefit. The enemy is illegal immigration”. Coldiretti: “There is room for 100,000 young people” / The Vinitaly 2023 dossier
Vigneto Italia continues to break records and to the over 4,000,000 producers taking part in the 55th edition of Vinitaly, the Minister of Agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, confirms not only the will to continue the battle on labels against Ireland’s choices and announces the decision to increase the coordination work abroad but above all he explains that the government will respond to the demand for manpower that comes from the lands of wine but also from all agriculture.
“We need legal immigration and the first enemy is the illegal one and there is a need to fight the illegal immigrants”. At the moment the government is not thinking about the reopening of the flows decree but in the future “there is the will to organize them seriously trying to relate with the countries of origin of the migrants, providing information and training but before doing this we must put all the Italians who are in a position to work to do it because I want to send a message clear working in agriculture is not demeaning”. And the minister, to the applause, adds: “I say it to those who are on the couch while taking their citizenship income”.
Companies in the agricultural world they have long been asking to be able to employ citizens’ income recipients in the fields. From the stage it was the mayor of Verona, Damiano Tommasi, to solicit an intervention to face this emergency. Now it remains to understand if and how it will be possible to apply these indications. What is certain, however, is that at the moment the reopening of the flows decree is not on the table of the government even if Lollobrigida says he is convinced that “our entrepreneurs need external manpower when there is no internal one”.
In terms of international promotioninstead, more coordinated actions are being announced, interventions solicited by the president of VeronaFiere, Maurizio Bricolo. Lollobrogida sees it this way: ”We defend culture, work, history, tradition, well-being, quality and we try to do it at Vinitaly too”. Then he added: “Verona is an excellence and the Veneto region runs faster than others but we must try to align the entire Italian system because there is nothing stronger than the Italy brand”. From this point of view, the role of Ice and also of Simest will be central. Pasquale Salzano, president of the finance company, recalled that 18 billion are available over the next three years to support exports and the internationalization of all Italian companies.
A position, that of the minister, shared by Coldiretti which bears a number of supporting numbers. in the Italian countryside there is still room for “at least 100,000 young people”, after last year, according to data from the same association, one in three of the million workers who entered agriculture with an employee contract were under 35. To these must be added the over 55,000 young Italian entrepreneurs who, again in 2022, had chosen to invest in the land, from cultivation to livestock, from agritourism. Coldiretti, from Vinitaly, also reports the most requested specialized figures, such as tractor drivers, greenhouse growers, pruners and agriculture 4.0 technicians to drive drones, read weather data and use IT tools. The inclusion of young Italians in the world of the fields is also favored by the need to fill the lack of manpower that severely hit the countryside last year, with the significant loss of national agricultural crops.