10/04/2024
Miljoenenfraude met EU-subsidies
Begin maart verscheen in la Repubblica een artikel over de maffiose praktijken van niet spookboerderijen en fraude met EU-middelen in In Abruzzo. Daarin kwam ook Nunzio Marcelli aan het woord. Ik postte het artikel en de Engelse vertaling van Life in Abruzzo al eerder.
Vandaag besteedde Bureau Buitenland van de VPRO daar aandacht aan op NPO Radio 1. Angelo Van Schaik trok naar Abruzzo om te spreken met wetenschapper Nina Calandra en enkele ondernemers, waaronder ook weer Nunzio Marcelli.
Luister hier naar de hele rapportage van Bureau Buitenland. De reportage van Angelo Van Schaik hoor je vanaf minuut 5:18. Nunzio Marcelli komt vanaf 10:47 aan het woord.
https://podcast.npo.nl/file/bureau-buitenland/105972/doet-brussel-genoeg-tegen-miljoenenfraude-met-eu-subsidies.mp3?awCollectionid=feed-24-bureau-buitenland&awEpisodeid=feed-24-bureau-buitenland_episode-105972-WO_VPRO_20188241
https://www.facebook.com/lifeinabruzzo/posts/pfbid02habYVp44wy5hnSwtM1fq77vTEzKL2Q6qp9H6ah3ABimM7QcTSmcFAM3JKJrb3bfQl
We published an article about the Mafia's infiltration of Abruzzo's precious farms and gold-filled land grab written by our cultural associate member Nunzio Marcelli a couple of years ago. Here is an update in the newspaper Repubblica. During the 5-year tenure of the current Abruzzese regional far-right government, they have remained strangely silent on creating a desert in Abruzzo, inactive at stopping it in its tracks.
"L'Aquila. Two stray dogs wander on the provincial road that goes from Ofena towards Campo Imperatore. All around is uncultivated land that rises and falls until it reaches the slopes of the Gran Sasso. Yet here there should be a great coming and going of tractors, carts livestock, machinery and farmers. On paper, for hectares and hectares as far as the eye can see, these fields appear to be intensively cultivated or intended for grazing large herds of cattle. And yet here you don't meet a living soul for kilometres until you reach the large esplanade under the Gran Sasso, where you can glimpse the abandoned hotel which for a few days was Benito Mussolini's prison after the surrender of fascist Italy to the allies. Eighty years later something strange is happening in these desolate districts. The first to notice it Lina Calandra was a Geography teacher at the University of L'Aquila: from her office overlooking these valleys, she too did not see the great movement that should be there.
From the maps and lists on her desk there should be companies full of employees and animals: because this is evident from the documents of Agea, the body that provides European Community Policy funding to Italian farmers. It begins with some complaints such as that of Dino Rossi, a farmer whose tractor was burned, and with the articles by Maria Grazia Trozzi and Daniela Braccani, but above all from the gaze of Calandra this story of (fake) owners of the lands of Abruzzo (and not only): a story of scams against the European Union, of companies existing but only on paper which among their members also include exponents of the Foggia mafia and of strange characters who speak a non-local accent linked to the Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta. A story that starts from the lands of Campo Imperatore and involves the whole country which prides itself on agriculture, but has the record for fraud in Brussels. In the background, there are the 30 billion euros that the Common Agricultural Policy makes available to Italy for each programming cycle. A river of money that is increasingly attractive to fake farmers and to a handful of large companies in the sector who use only part of it: for the rest they make "false documents" to make their estates appear very active, which are deserted, without animals, men and vehicles. A great desert worth its weight in gold, as we will see.
This story begins in a narrow room of the University of L'Aquila department of Social Sciences. Here Professor Calandra began research on Abruzzo's agricultural policy in 2020. “For some time we had noticed that something was wrong – she tells Repubblica – and that is that in economic terms, compared to the amount of contributions and land put up for tender by the Municipalities, agriculture was not very flourishing”. Abruzzo still has a very high number of public lands, the so-called civic uses: if in the rest of Italy the Municipalities and state bodies have sold the lands that were previously given under concession, here small bodies still have thousands and thousands of hectares. Land that is put up for auction every two or three years to the highest bidder to pay the rent. For example, the Municipality of Lucoli, 890 inhabitants, puts up to three thousand hectares of land up for tender. And so are a myriad of small municipalities in Abruzzo. But for a few years now, discontent has been brewing in the streets and alleys of these villages. “We started receiving reports from local farmers who had to close their businesses because at auctions the land went to “foreigners”, that is, to non-local people”, says Calandra, who began research halfway between his matter and that of an investigator: to understand what is happening in his Region, in his land. With her staff of researchers and students she interviews over a thousand farmers, cross-references deeds and documents, goes to the National Agricultural Information System, to Agea, to the municipal registers. So she begins to draw a map that really tells us something anomalous. But, above all, she collects testimonies from farmers who report pressure, threats, and intimidation, even if the police force has not received a single complaint in the meantime.
Professor Calandra records the conversations and a farmer tells her: “These Northern companies rent the pastures here. For a pasture that would normally be rented for a thousand euros, they offer ten thousand and I can't compete with them. In this way the mountains around here are all assigned to them by the Municipalities. Their advantage is that they get 200-300 thousand euros in contributions with all the land that they grab and that they already had in the North." She tells another agricultural entrepreneur: “These take the land through frontmen, local people, or by creating companies with registered office in their territories. Then they move, hanging out first in an area, then they change, and then they return. They cause confusion with company names. They are very well-prepared, qualified people."
Yet another anonymous farmer tells Calandra: "They are often ghost breeders, agricultural companies only on paper made up of bankers, accountants, lawyers, notaries and some poor naive people from the area who lend themselves to the game believing in the promises of easy money." Testimonies also reveal intimidation, strange characters who speak a non-local accent and theft of livestock from those who oppose and try to make better offers at public auctions: “Our mountains are no longer safe places. There have been thefts in Campo Imperatore. One two three four times. At first thefts of cows, then also of sheep. In just one night, 30 cows disappeared for me. Then they stole my agricultural vehicles." To another they said: “Either you give the milk to that person or you keep it all. I had to close. I was threatened." The result is that in just a few years around fifty local farms have closed, while strange characters have bought up public land and won all the auctions. But in the meantime, animals and vehicles are disappearing from the land, instead of increasing and improving crops and livestock. Indeed, in the districts there are stories of trucks that left the Gargano for Abruzzo loaded with animals that were unloaded at night: "They are sick animals - Calandra records - they unload them and let them go around so they infect everything, even the healthy pastures ”.
In these valleys you no longer sleep as peacefully as you once did. Tension is rising as reported by some recent news events: cows illegally unloaded and abandoned, farmers who one day found forty cattle quartered or half set on fire, water pipes cut, tractor wheels punctured. And flames, here and there, like in Campo Imperatore: a brand new hotel destroyed, a refuge reduced to ashes. But not only. A boy from a small village in the area who had just bought a van to make sandwiches for passing tourists was approached by some people with Apulian accents: "You can't work here". And the boy's dream was thus extinguished before it even began. Some, very few, put their face to it: "You can't even count all the animals that have killed me. They killed the last cow two months ago. I found her dead inside a ravine", Assunta Valente, owner of a farm on the border between Lazio and Abruzzo, who has been subjected to continuous violence for more than three years, told L'Espresso and also the police forces. intimidation and theft. “I didn't immediately understand that the attacks were targeted, at first I didn't notice. Then they became more frequent and the threats also arrived. Pipes cut, they tore open the wheels of my tractor, tore up the fences where I keep the animals. Until real executions began. They did everything to me, even killed the dogs."
For Valente, the perpetrators are “those of the grazing mafia because they want the land. They started by stealing animals but then realized that the most effective way to put farmers in difficulty is to kill the livestock. They don't buy your company but forcefully force you to abandon it. If you take away from a farmer the land where he takes his animals to graze, what else will he have left?”. A pastor who for years has been denouncing the "oddities" and the pressures and auctions always won by a few is Nunzio Marcelli from Aversa: "We are witnessing the phenomenon of land grabbing, the closure of honest companies and the impossibility for young people to remain in this land – he says – we are creating a desert”.
Read Nunzio's piece on our blog
https://lifeinabruzzo.com/grazing-mafia-abruzzo/