The 2022 agricultural year in Tuscany is a mix of drought, inflation, and signs of recovery.

In 2022, drought and inflation severely impacted the performance of agricultural businesses in all Italian regions, particularly the northern ones.

In Tuscany, agricultural performance was mostly positive, despite farms struggling to recover from the pandemic’s annus horribilis. Real production increased by 2.7%, bucking the national contraction of 1.5%, while nominal production, driven by the general rise in prices, grew by 16.2%, compared to the national average of 15.4%.

Tuscany’s positive performance, however, should not obscure the underlying problem. While rising prices may have somewhat offset the low national production in terms of revenue—but not necessarily allowed all farms to cope with rising costs—the impact of 2022’s weather anomalies should not be underestimated, as it is not caused by a temporary problem. Italian food demand is heavily dependent on the production of a small group of regions, with Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, and Veneto meeting approximately 40% of its demand. This means that the exceptional drought affecting the Po Basin has particularly affected certain products that are the basis of Italian families’ eating habits and put the country’s food security at risk.

Ongoing climate change requires reflection on the future of agriculture and our food systems, on country-level strategies to adapt to ever-rising temperatures and water scarcity, on the structure of our food system and on our dependence on foreign sources, in a global context also subject to the same critical issues.

On the other hand, this reasoning also has implications for strategies that can be implemented at the local level. This is not so much to cultivate the illusion of self-sufficiency, but rather to assess the vulnerability of regional agriculture to increasingly recurring climate shocks and understand whether and how it will be possible to compensate for any resulting reduction in inputs and final goods.

In addition to the usual analyses of production and value-added trends, agricultural supply chains, prices, household food consumption, and agricultural labor, this note contains a dedicated box that focuses on the potential consequences that an increased frequency of droughts like the one in 2022 could have on our food security. (…)