Lots of funding, little investment and the risk of sending unused funds back to Brussels. It is the all-Italian paradox of the scarce ability to put European structural funds to good use. A long-tested vice, which with these moonshine for public finance takes on the flavor of mockery, so much so as to induce the Prime Minister himself, Giuseppe Conte, to whisper into the microphones on the occasion of a conference "it's not always the fault of the Europe".
A script, from which not even agriculture escapes, whose chapter, despite the shearing of the last decade, still accounts for about 30% of the Community budget.
According to the latest surveys, updated to the first half of this year, the turning point of the current seven-year programming, the expenditure bar reported in Brussels to finance investments in Italian farms under the EAFRD (European Development Fund rural) is below 14%. In a nutshell, adding up all public community spending and national co-financing, it stops at 780 million, out of a budget for the entire programming of 5,7 billion euros.
Environmental measures, such as contributions disbursed in the form of compensation for areas with natural constraints, with the use of almost half of the funds available, have quite another draw; organic agriculture is also doing well, a sector by now widely consumed internally and an emerging driving force for exports as well, which at the same date has already committed 37% of its aid budget.
The environmental one has also become an obligatory step for agriculture to create a model of sustainable development, and the good response of farmers to "cultivate ecology" is certainly a positive fact. But it alone is not enough to reach the final goal, i.e. getting on the market, if it is not combined with the other pivot of the system, i.e. the economic sustainability that only a more competitive business system is able to guarantee.
A double track embarked some time ago by the much criticized common agricultural policy (one of the main targets of Salvini's anti-European rosary) which for over a decade has added to the first pillar, made up of automatic incentives for farmers based on hectares, the second pillar for the rural development, with a substantial package of finance to innovate and boost farms.
"Enough to give away fish, better a rod and teach how to fish" was the slogan that somehow greeted the great turning point with which Brussels decided to balance the guaranteed price system, with structural measures aimed at financing the investment plans of farms, especially in the most disadvantaged rural areas.
For now, the data show that things have not gone exactly in this direction, certainly not to the desired extent. Automatic incentives, income-saving crutch for farmers, thus continue to take the lion's share, including the paradox - which not even the latest EU reforms have managed to dent - of the so-called "decoupling": in practice the European Union continues to give these subsidies also to producers who choose not to produce; to collect the prize, it is enough to keep the fields in order and the income is guaranteed.
On the contrary, to draw on investment funds you need an idea, then a project, then the ability to complete and manage it. In a word, making the leap from farmer to agricultural entrepreneur. Perhaps it is precisely this uncommon corporate culture (together with the complexity of the administrative procedures that add up the bureaucratic load of Brussels, the Ministry of Agricultural Policies and the Regions) that is the real brake on a wider use of the structural funds, which risk returning to the coffers of Brussels to be redistributed to other EU partners.
