Italy’s Minister of Agriculture is a job with a turnover rate as high as that of Italian governments themselves. But since assuming office as Italy’s current Minister of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests in October 2022, Francesco Lollobrigida, 52, has acted with gusto.
Though his background is in law and rightist politics, Lollobrigida seems to thrive on shaping agricultural policy. He’s a strong advocate for responsible wine drinking, innovative farming as Italy’s way forward and encouraging young people to stay on the land.
He has had his controversies, making headlines for banning production, imports and sale of lab-grown meat. And his harsh comments on immigration caused an outcry.
But Lollobrigida has also taken some progressive stands on behalf of sustainable agriculture, combating climate change and the experimental techniques called TEA (Assisted Evolution Technologies) for editing the genomes of vinestock and other plants to make them more resistant to disease and drought.
An ardent defender of Italian wine culture, Lollobrigida recently hosted the first Wine Ministerial Meeting in Italy with representatives of 29 countries and leaders of the France-based International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV), whose president is Italian enology professor and winemaker Luigi Moio.
I met with Lollobrigida at the recent annual OperaWine: Finest Italian Wines, the signature event developed by Wine Spectator and Veronafiere to kick off Vinitaly, Italy’s premier wine fair, in Verona.
Wine Spectator: All over the world today, people are talking about a wine crisis. Let’s talk about that and the results of the ministerial conference.
This year will be 100 years since the establishment of the OIV, which was born after the great Spanish Flu pandemic and the Great War and during American Prohibition. Now, after 100 years, we have the same problems: A pandemic that has just been overcome, we have many wars unfortunately, and we have people who imagine that in prohibition there is a solution for some health problems.
We discussed in this conference the value of wine to protect the earth from an environmental point of view. The farmer is the first environmentalist on the planet. And when one goes around Italy you immediately notice that the most beautiful areas are those sculpted by man with agriculture: in the vineyards of Franciacorta, on the hills of Prosecco, Chianti, Montalcino, Etna and, in the south, in Puglia.
Where there is agriculture, the environment is protected. At the conference we worked on every aspect: culture identity, history, research. We also need today to address climate change with new recipes that put technological innovations at the service of agriculture.
Speaking of technological innovations, you have embraced the idea of TEA (Assisted Evolution Technologies)—genome editing to create more resistant vines that need fewer chemical treatments.
TEA will allow us to accelerate resistance to disease, without resorting to unnatural mixtures such as GMOs that combine genes of different species. We do not want to change nature. We want to help nature to go its own way.
Right now these technologies are allowed in Italy and Europe only on an experimental basis. Will there be resistance to it as a kind of genetic modification lite?
It is an acceleration—it’s not modification.
In nature, some vines resist peronospora [downy mildew] naturally. It is accelerating a process that nature would be able to do but it would take maybe hundreds of years. You can do it scientifically faster by acting on DNA. But you are not turning a vine into a plant with the DNA of a beet. You are making a strong vineyard—resistant to disease and with less water consumption.
Italy has sided with many other European nations in favor of this process. Some other nations are more resistant and so there is an internal debate. In Lombardy this year, we will start the first vine trials in the field, authorized by the European Union on these technologies. We hope to be able to quickly have more resistant plants.
If Europe doesn’t speed up this process but a nation like China or another country that doesn’t meet our rules were to do it, they would have stronger plants and stronger production, and here [in Europe] instead you would still need pesticides.
Italy has a demographic crisis: an old population and a low birth rate. In the countrysides, fewer and fewer young people want to do the work of farming. Who will do the work in the future? Migrants or machines?
We must modernize agriculture with technological innovation. Today, there are sophisticated machines ranging from drones to harvesting machines, but the machine should not replace man.
We are in favor, obviously, of using the domestic labor force first. If, as it happens, there is a lack of domestic workers, we have to bring in those who want to come to work in Italy.
Italians have been a people of emigration; in the United States and elsewhere, our grandparents went to work. However, immigration must be legal, and we must help those who arrive to already have training in the language and culture and on the work they come to do. Often now, people come from Bangladesh or India and they have never seen a grape. So, it is preferable to help them before they arrive and organize regular flows.
A common complaint is that here migrants come to work, but they have work only for three months of the year.
Seasonal workers are needed in several economic sectors, such as tourism. Same applies to agriculture. During harvests, our farmers need additional workers. They often come from abroad. If they are good workers, our farmers prefer to employ them rather than new ones and, in perspective, they may hire them on a permanent basis.
At the same time, if you ask someone to move from another country to Italy, you have to assure them a contract to allow them and their families to have a future with some form of assistance, schooling, healthcare, etc.
We are also investing in our agricultural schools. We have exceptional agricultural institutes where the farmers of the future are being trained—farmers who will not work with shovels and hoes but with drones, research and science at their disposition.
There is arguably too much wine in the world. In Italy there is often a conflict between those who advocate quality versus industrial producers only interested in quantity. What is your perspective?
Italy is a small country, but for wine it is a great producer. We, however, need to invest more in quality and less in quantity. We have three Italian regions—Veneto, Piedmont and Tuscany—that produce 52 percent of the wine value, but not of the production. So, we have many regions that produce in quantity but can’t sell at a sustainable price. We need to try to open up as many markets as possible while focusing on the quality of the product.
Drink little, drink well and pay the correct price. This is the model that in my opinion can inspire our wine consumption and our production.
Let’s talk about young consumers and young producers. There’s a lot of worry about young people not drinking the way previous generations did. What can be done to bring young people closer to wine?
For young producers, we have to guarantee a living. We have put in place a measure to allow young men and women to be able to buy land with a subsidized loan at no interest. We want to keep them attached to the land.
We’ve made investments in agricultural institutes to give them training and in promotion of our products to ensure they have enough income. If you love doing something, but it doesn’t produce enough income for a living, you won’t do it. They need to have some certainty.
On the other hand, we need fewer consumers but more and more citizens who are thinking consumers. The difference is the consumer is passive, while the thinking consumer decides what to consume, chooses what to consume. We know from the cultural point of view that the person who understands what he is consuming will buy higher quality and that will allow our market to grow.
We need to explain [wine culture] to young people using all the tools at hand while avoiding wine being demonized.
Italy is among the countries with the highest life expectancy rates in the world and, in Italy, wine is present in moderate amounts. No one will ever advise you to drink a liter of wine at lunch and two liters at dinner, but a glass of wine at lunch and a glass of wine at dinner. My father is a doctor, and many more authoritative doctors and scientists say [moderate wine consumption] helps a number of physical processes and especially mental processes because it brings out conviviality and sincerity.
We need to teach young people about the positive elements of our agricultural system.
Do you have a concrete example of a teaching tool for wine?
In our exhibition at Vinitaly, we talk about wine from the perspectives of history, art and culture. And we have a multimedia room that describes the three dimensions of wine. One dimension is the dimension of images—incredible moving images of vines and wine under the microscope. The second dimension is the land that produces wine, because you need to also study the geological evolution and the aspects of the territories that give a good wine. And the third dimension is the flavors you find in wine connected with the tastes nature gives you.
How important is wine tourism to Italy?
Italy represents 0.2 percent of the planet, but it has more of the world’s cultural heritage than any other country [the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites, at 59], and people come here to see it.
People who used to come just to see the monuments today come to see our gastronomic monuments—to know the places that produce the food they heard about or that they tasted in one of 250,000 Italian restaurants in the world.
What is being done concretely to help those corners of the country blighted by illegal dumping or abandonment?
There are two phenomena. First, in the polluted areas, we have to intervene. Second are the degraded areas that have been abandoned over the years by farmers.
When the European Union was created in 1957, agricultural policy was the only shared economic policy. It was shared at the European level because it guaranteed two things: One was food security and the other was security for the environment because you didn’t have farmers leave their land. And there was a system of subsidies used to guarantee income to farmers in weak areas.
Over time, they lost their effect. And in Italy, we are reshaping incentives to bring back abandoned territories. There are examples like the city of Caivano [pop. 35,000, a one-time industrial agricultural hub north of Naples], which became the symbol of degradation, where there were remnants of pollution and drug dealers. There is now a beautiful agricultural institute where you find well-maintained, cultivated fields and a series of hydroponic greenhouses. Thanks to agriculture—a healthy model linked to tradition.
