Agromafie. 6th Report on agro-food crimes in Italy (2019)
The turnover generated by agro-criminals continues to grow, unaffected by the stagnation of the Italian and international economies, and immune to global trade tensions and barriers to the movement of goods and capital. Crime manages to perfectly integrate into the food chain, from production to transport, from distribution to sales. Besides, they have all the necessary characteristics to attract the interest of organisations that are gradually abandoning their former paramilitary clothes to wear suits and ‘white-collar’ clothing, thus managing to discover and better manage the advantages of globalisation, new technologies, economics and finance to the extent that we can now reasonably speak of Mafia 3.0. The new mafia levers, mainly originate from the traditional families which have oriented their children, grandchildren and various relatives to study in prestigious Italian and international universities. Moreover, they are partly the product of a richly remunerated “enrolment” operation of operators on the various financial markets of the world.
They are educated, prepared, multilingual people, with important and regular international relations at the service of the mafia business which, thanks to them, acquires and consolidates a trans-national and global character. The criminal powers lurk in the path that fruit and vegetables, meat and fish have to take to reach Italian tables, passing through a number of large trading markets to large-scale distribution, destroying competition and the free legal market whilst repressing honest business. The result is a price increase, heavy damage to the image of Italian products in Italy and abroad, and health risks. Not to mention the consequences for the environment, with illegal landfills and waste management offences accounting for more than 30,000 eco-crimes per year in Italy.
These are some of the aspects that emerge from the sixth Agromafie Report drawn up by Eurispes, Coldiretti and the Agro-food Crime Observatory.