Italy: 32.4% of farms gone in the last 10 years
That is what emerges from an analysis of Istat census data Istat of Italian agriculture done by Coldiretti, a growers association.
As Coldiretti underlines, while there was an increase in the average company size, there is an erosion of fertile land due not only to the subtraction for industrial, residential, civil and infrastructure but also to the abandonment of marginal areas, not able to ensure sufficient income to maintain agricultural activities. This is demonstrated by the fact that over the last 20 years the forest area increased by about 20% but that owned by farms just halved. 300,000 hectares of land have been abandoned due to the effect of closing farms.