"While the European Commission continues to take one step forward and one backward on the increase of agri-food production in the countries of the European Union, despite the clear invitation of the heads of state and government to increase the continent's self-sufficiency, a situation of tension in North Africa and the Middle East”, this is the position of Luigi Scordamaglia, managing director of the Italian sector, who underlines that the emerging countries are the ones most dependent on imports of cereals and basic food items from Russia and Ukraine.

We are talking about countries like Eritrea which depend 100% on the wheat produced in the 2 countries, or Somalia whose dependency ratio exceeds 90%, or Egypt which depends for 80% on the production of these. areas. In summary, 50 developing countries are dependent for over 30% on cereal imports from this area and 25 of these are over 50% dependent. "In most cases", the managing director continues, "these are countries whose governments base a large part of their consensus on providing food at accessible conditions, a stabilizer that in this case could disappear in a short time". Lebanon, for example, recently confirmed that it has a grain stock for no more than two weeks.

“Faced with this scenario, we would expect the European Commission to take a clearer stance in favor of agri-food production”, the association continues, “rather than partial and limited measures over time”. According to Scordamaglia: "the situation must be handled immediately: we ask that the application of the new CAP be suspended immediately for at least two years and the Farm to Fork strategy, whose effects are now defined by a series of studies, be revised in the light of the new scenario incomprehensibly still missing a serious impact assessment by the Commission itself, are those of a collapse of European agri-food production around 20% and a further increase in the prices of some products up to 40%. It is incomprehensible that European political unity, which has never been as strong as it is now, is then fragmented by a short-sighted bureaucracy that has not yet understood the strong change in the context”.