The crisis of family businesses in the italian agricultural sector

After the economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 we had in Europe the beginning of the crisis of the agricultural sector. This crisis started especially with the deflation of the price bubble of the agrarian raw materials and commodities (such as wheat) (De Filippis and Romano, 2010). The real problems of this crisis occurred when scholars realized that the prices were in free fall since the beginning and never stabilized. One of the European countries that was particularly affected by this scenario was Italy. In fact, in the Italian peninsula this crisis brought a particularly high lack of investment and human resources in the agricultural sector (Martina,2017). Right now, in 2020, in addition to these previous issues we have also to face new challenges such as epidemics and an increase of climate change phenomena. The present research, focused on Italy, offers a general overview on the European Area to understand more the regulations that rules the agrarian market. The main objective of this research, focused on family businesses, is to understand which are the real problems of the Italian agricultural sector, understand the causes of these problems and elaborate a solution for the crisis of agricultural family businesses in Italy in 2020. This research is articulated in 5 parts. In the first part there is the analysis of the relation between the financial crisis of 2007 with the crisis in the European agriculture. This part will focus on the price of the oil correlated with the one of the commodities. Moreover there is a focus on the aid of the European governments and a focus on the Italian agricultural history. The aid consists in putting at disposal of the EU governments a fund through the CAP. In the second part there is the analysis of the family businesses in Italy to understand in a deeper way how this companies were affected. In the third part, following Martina (2017), there is the analysis of new businesses on the Italian agricultural sector along with the market opportunity threats. Moreover there will be a focus also in the GMOs, an important topic of the last decade. In the fourth there is an the question of the interview to a farmer that reflect the real and current situation of this sector. In the fifth and last part there is the findings of the interview. From this research on Italian family businesses that aims to understand better the farmers' problems, their level of awareness on the topic and to see how they managed, in their own small way, to overcome these challenges it is emerged a very important data. Nowadays a lot of farmers are willing to quit this kind of job due to the higher risks, higher costs of production, the strong competition and the less value the big distributors are willing to pay to the product to the small farmers. Sadly this, as we can see, is bringing a situation where there is a huge decrease of the internal production (Marzialetti, Il Sole 24 Ore, 2020), an increase in the import and an increase of fallow fields, another important aspect of this thesis since it brings a wrong allocation of the resources.