THE CURRENT AGRI-FOOD DILEMMA: IF THE CITY PROPOSES, DOES THE FARMLAND PROVIDE IT?

For decades, the city has created food models by requiring the countryside to meet the growing demand with increasingly more homologated crop reconversions and increasingly vast and competitive farms. The current acceleration of the land concentration process and the dramatic experience of the COVID 19 pandemic have, however, forced us to redefine the city-country relationship, which has been called into question for some years now in various FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and EU (European Union) documents. Based on the GECOAGRI-LANDITALY (Comparative Geography of Agricultural Areas European and non-European) survey itinerary, a proven tool for reading local peculiarities, the authors show how easy it is to recognize which farmlands can best fulfil the role of guaranteeing food safety and protecting the quality and typicality of traditional foods. The final proposal is to start a new agri-food policy that no longer starts from the demand formulated by the city but, reversing the direction of the old relationship, it starts from the availability of products offered by the countryside to re-educate consumption and promote the sustainability of agricultural practices.