2025 Volume 51 Issue 1 Pages 41-52
For rural development in Italy, each regional agritourism law stipulates that there must be a high proportion of local agricultural products among the foods provided to tourists by agritourism farms. To differentiate these agritourism farmhouses from traditional hotel, restaurant, and cafe operators, products produced on the farm and in the region must account for 60% to 100% of the price of the products they supply. To understand how to support this agricultural product procurement network, semi-structured interview surveys regarding both representative agritourism associations and leading agritourism farmers were performed in the following three regions: Trentino-Alto Adige (TAA), Veneto, and Sardinia. These regions were selected on the basis of a statistical analysis of every Italian region with respect to the greatest amounts of wine production per capita and the highest numbers of food producers per capita under the Geographical Indication (GI) protection system.
To summarize the results: Each agritourism association plays an important role in procuring food ingredients within the region, mainly by using individual telephone correspondence (in the case of the Gallo Rosso Association in TAA), or by using an internet agricultural product search database (in the case of the nationwide Terranostra Association). However, in neither region did the associations strongly recommend that these farmers use only GI-registered foods. Rather, the Gallo Rosso Association in TAA, which for geographical and historical reasons has a large number of small-scale agritourism farms, launched its own high-quality brand registration system separate from the GI system, and additionally it promoted sales by moves such as setting up an online shop. In Veneto, the regional agritourism law requires that these farmers offer at least 15% of a variety of high-quality certified foods, including GI foods. In addition, the farmer surveyed in Sardinia has created their own organic brands for local sale. The distribution of a certain amount of various high-quality and regional-brand products by widely implementing the above supporting methods within each part of Italy ultimately leads to increased employment of agritourism farmers and GI producers.
