"Extraordinary intervention is needed to support Sardinian companies affected by the increase in the cost of raw materials. The State takes charge of this economic and social emergency, defining a national intervention strategy, involving the Regions, Parliament and if necessary the Community institutions ". The Regional Councilor for Agriculture, Gabriella Murgia, together with colleagues from the other Regions, asks this in one of the various letters sent to the coordinator of the Agricultural Policy Commission of the Conference of Regions.
"The resources of the regional budget - underlines the commissioner Murgia - are not sufficient to deal with an emergency of this magnitude and the current regulatory spaces in the field of state aid severely limit the areas of intervention of the Regions. The Board is ready to do his part, as demonstrated in these two years of pandemic and in the face of meteoric emergencies, calamities and, lastly, in the face of the spread of the blue language ".
"Since last autumn - adds the exponent of the Giunta Solinas - we have been receiving reports from all agricultural supply chains that highlight the compromise of the economic sustainability of the business activity as a result of a series of events induced by the spread of the pandemic from Covid19 and its persistence over time ".
Primary production companies report an increase in operating costs, driven upwards by the rise in the prices of the raw materials used. The recent evolution of prices recorded in the energy market, explains the commissioner, has then produced a marked increase in the price of agricultural diesel and that of fertilizers, where price increases of up to 100% are recorded in one year. "Increases - Gabriella Murgia points out - which in Sardinia also incorporate a competitive disadvantage compared to the prices charged in the Peninsula due to the high logistical costs due to the insular condition, which in recent months have been strongly influenced mainly by the rise in the price of oil".
The companies involved in the transformation and marketing of products also suffer from this increase in prices, the commissioner points out, to which is added the contraction in the sales of the Horeca channel (hotels, restaurants and bars) and the reduction in profit margins "consequent to the evident change in household consumption habits, with balance sheets weakened by two years of pandemic ".
"A state of affairs that has now led to the closure of numerous businesses and the number of which will only grow if adequate support tools and interventions are not identified to prevent the further evolution of this phenomenon or at least to stem it. Tools that cannot be identified by the individual Regions, both for the narrow margins of administrative intervention that they have and because the causes of the same go beyond regional borders and for many aspects even national ones ", concludes the Councilor for Agriculture.
(Unioneonline / vl)
