As part of Milan’s drive to promote a sustainable urban food policy, schoolchildren are being encouraged to take home leftovers of non-perishable food, armed with doggy bags bearing the slogan “I DON’T WASTE”. Credit: Municipality of Milan

By Maurizio Baruffi
MILAN, Apr 28 2015 (IPS)

How can we provide healthy food for everyone, without threatening the survival of our planet? This is the fundamental issue at the centre of Expo 2015 – which has ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’ as its central theme – and a huge challenge for cities. 

More than 50 percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas – a proportion that is projected to increase to 66 percent by 2050 – and ensuring the right to food for all citizens, especially the urban poor, is key to promoting sustainable and equitable development.

As the city hosting Expo 2015, Milan has great visibility and an extraordinary political opportunity for working to build more resilient urban food systems. This is a vision that the City of Milan has decided to fulfil by formulating its own Food Policy, and by bringing together as many cities as possible to subscribe to an Urban Food Policy Pact: a global engagement to “feed cities” in a more just and sustainable way.

How we can provide healthy food for everyone, without threatening the survival of our planet, is the fundamental issue at the centre of Expo 2015 and a huge challenge for cities
The food policy, which will be implemented by Milan’s city government over the next five years, is being drafted through a wide participatory process, starting with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the city’s food system.

This is a complex picture with some bright spots and some shadows highlighting several thematic areas that the food policy should take into consideration: from access to food to the environmental and social impact of food production and distribution, from food waste to education.

Milan has more than 1.3 million inhabitants, but almost two million people come to the city every day for work, study, leisure or, health care.

Through its public catering company Milano Ristorazione, the City of Milan prepares and delivers more than 80,000 meals each day for schools, retirement homes and reception centres. Thus, there is a lot the City can do to enhance and spread good practices – for example, by tackling food waste and improving the sustainability of the food supply chain.

Many projects are already in place. More than one-third of the fruit and vegetables served by Milano Ristorazione is organic, 57 percent is supplied from short distance, and children at school are encouraged to take home a doggie bag with leftovers of non-perishable food.

Every year, families in Milan still waste the equivalent of one month of food consumption, but several non-profit organisations are saving the food surplus from supermarkets and cafeterias and delivering it to more than one hundred of the city’s charities.

Meanwhile, with poverty on the rise as a result of the prolonged economic crisis, civil society and public institutions are working actively to help those in need. Soup kitchens offer around two million meals each year and the City of Milan itself delivers almost 250,000 meals to the elderly and the disabled.

The Office of the Mayor is currently asking citizens, civil society organisations, scholars, innovative entrepreneurs and chefs, among others, to have their say on the issues that the city’s food policy should address. The purpose is to draw up a strategic document that will be discussed in a town meeting in May, when a number of planning panels (Food Malls) will be launched. Their task is to turn the guidelines into pilot projects.

The process will culminate in the adoption of the food policy by the City of Milan and the launch of a number of pilot projects that will address some of the issues outlined in the food policy over coming years.

In the meantime, progress on the Urban Food Policy Pact is proceeding swiftly. The idea of an international protocol on local food policies was launched in February 2014 by the mayor of Milan, Giuliano Pisapia, at the summit of the C40 (Cities Climate Leadership Group) in Johannesburg.

A few months later, Milan and more than 30 cities around the world started to discuss the Pact, exchanging data, goals and best practices through webinars carried out under the Food Smart Cities for Development project financed by the EU Commission-DEAR (Development, Education, Awareness Raising) programme.

It is thrilling to see very different urban areas such as New York, São Paulo, Ghent, Daegu, Abidjan and Melbourne sharing projects, ideas, problems and solutions with a common goal: to build  a network of cities willing to work together to transform their future, placing the issue of food high on the political agenda.

A group of international experts is currently working on a draft of the Pact’s protocol that will be submitted to an advisory council and cities. The task of the advisory council – which is made up of international organisations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Health Organisation (WHO), World Food Programme (WFP) and the European Commission – is to review the pact and ensure that it is consistent with other international initiatives on the similar subjects.

Many cities have expressed their interest in subscribing to the Urban Food Policy Pact – to be signed in October this year on the occasion of World Food Day – and its proponents expect it to be one of the most significant legacies of Expo 2015.

Looking forward, the Pact will also feature at the U.N. Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in December.

Agriculture and food production are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and our ability to produce food will be highly affected by climate change – building a more resilient world, where the right to food is ensured for everyone, is a process that need to start from cities, and from their ability to develop sustainable policies.

Edited by Phil Harris    

More information about Milan’s Food Policy and the Urban Food Policy Pact can be found at www.cibomilano.org/

Excerpt:

The beauty of the Bay of Naples under a setting sun, the romance of Sorrento and the scenic splendour of the Amalfi coastline pull thousands of visitors to southern Italy. But the region is also home to an ugly truth.

The area between Caserta and Naples in the Campania region has come to be known as Italy’s ‘garbage bin’, thanks to the mafia.

The country produces nearly 100 million tonnes of garbage per year, with over a third of it reportedly cornered by the mafia.

The mafia initially began by charging industries from the north for disposing of their toxic wastes in landfills in Campania, especially the Resit landfill site in Giugliano. A neglected and under-regulated sector, waste disposal was an easy front for the mafia to generate and launder money.“We have been shouting about this for 20 years, but with no response from the government."

“We have been shouting about this for 20 years, but with no response from the government. They did not want to listen,” says Antonio Pergolizzi of the environmental NGO Legambiente which has been researching the issue since 1994.

Legambiente coined the term ‘ecomafie’ or ecomafia for this new face of the mafia.

Italian legislation for solid waste disposal came in 2001, but without adequate provisions to check proper disposal. The law was subsequently amended in 2006 to encompass 152 new types of environmental crimes, including illegal disposal and organised smuggling of waste.

But in 2010, Italy’s measures to clean up Naples were found to be in breach of the European Union (EU) legislation and an inspection team was sent in. By 2012, the EU threatened court action against Italy.

“The eco mafia are now dumping toxics into quarries, on lands, into waters, with no care for aquifers or the environment, and with serious consequences for the community,” Pergolizzi told an international gathering of journalists at Castell dell’Ovo on the seafront in Naples that was attended by this correspondent. The meet was organised by the NGO Greenaccord.

The country’s garbage crisis is now almost institutionalised as industries find it cheaper to pay the mafia to dispose of their waste and send illegal waste to other countries too, says anti-mafia attorney Franco Roberti.

According to him, the mafia are now making alliances with non-waste agencies too.

“They are looking at businesses for financing, giving funds, laundering money. Italy’s clean economy is now getting dirtier,” he says.

Wind farms and other alternative energy businesses are known to have been built with mafia money.

Pergolizzi says the mafia are cornering road-building and other contracts, using building yards as the site for mixing gravel and toxic wastes “all over north and south Italy.”

Real estate on these dumping yards has become a profitable venture for the mafia.

Legambiente estimates that the business of illegally dumping toxic waste on Italian farmland and real estate land is worth over 26 billion dollars a year, writes U.S. journalist Christine Macdonald in E Magazine.

The business of dumping toxic waste has encompassed recycling material, such as plastics, with serious environmental consequences, says Legambiente.

“We now have a whole group of recycling factories available, but there is no raw material for them; the recyclables are all getting diverted elsewhere,” says Pergolizzi.

At the SRI recycling factory in Caserta, a company officer explains how the authorities are now keeping a close watch on transportation of recycling material to the factory, which bales plastics, cardboard and cans separately and sends them on to actual recycling firms.

Naples’ new mayor, Tommaso Sodano, a former judge and new political entrant, says he is now taking a personal interest in recycling and in ways to deal with the garbage crisis.

“My job as a judge is the most important reason for me to have come into politics,” Sodano told journalists. “In both jobs, there have been, and are, obstacles in my way, which I will deal with as part of my work.”

Widespread dumping of toxics by the mafia in the Campania region has been found to be linked to cancers and congenital malformation. In two decades, the number of tumours in men in the region has risen by 47 percent and in women by 40 percent, according to a BBC report.

Earlier this month, tens of thousands of people protested on the streets of Naples, some with placards showing pictures of children who had died of cancer, and demanding an immediate clean-up.

Highlighting Italy’s deep socio-religious connections, Alfonso Cauteruccio, head of Greenaccord, says the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church is important in this matter.

The Vatican’s Cardinal Sepe has suggested to his audience at the meeting that a possible deterrent would be to refuse Holy Communion – the ultimate sacrament for believers – to those who pollute.

Roman Catholic Pope Francis has also waded into the waters, sending a message to the meeting in Naples that journalists and scientists needed to work together.

The first step is to take practical measures, says attorney Roberti. “There is no coordination between the agencies producing evidence. There is lack of funds to fight corruption. We need a re-organisation of our judicial system.”

“The nexus runs deep,” says Antonio Giordano of the Sbarro Institute in Philadelphia, pointing a finger at the health and environment ministries. “The blame is on those in power, those who knew and did nothing in the last 30-40 years.”

Recycling at last near Naples. Credit: A. D. McKenzie/IPS.

By A. D. McKenzie
NAPLES, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Before one reaches the premises of the Società Recupero Imballaggi (SRI), the smell in the air announces that this company in the southern Italian region of Campania deals with waste.

The strange chemically tinged aroma invades one’s nostrils, making one feel the need to don a mask. At the company itself, workers in protective gear busily sort plastic bottles, paper packaging and other substances, while another division transforms some of the waste into secondary raw materials that can be reused by industry.

The quantity of waste is striking: a constant stream of plastic bottles of various colours; hills of cardboard; giant stacks of paper. Italy has long had a waste management problem, and plants like this are an attempt to find solutions."Every year, more than 8 billion plastic bags end up as litter in Europe, causing enormous environmental damage."

But Italy is not alone. As the current European Week for Waste Reduction (Nov. 16 – 24) is highlighting, many countries in the 28-member European Union need to work harder to decrease the amount of waste generated.

“EU legislation has already driven the beginning of a revolution in European waste management,” says Janez Potočnik, the EU’s Environment Commissioner. “We are composting and recycling more than ever, and landfill is progressively falling – but of course some member states are far ahead of others in this.”

According to figures from the statistics directorate Eurostat, the EU generates some 3 billion tonnes of waste annually, of which 90 million tonnes are hazardous. By 2020, the bloc could be generating 45 percent more waste than it did in 1995.

Among the recalcitrant siblings in the EU family, Italy is a special case, attracting the attention of both EU officials and international environmentalists. Naples, capital of the Campania region, has been seen globally as a textbook case of bad waste management policies, where illegal disposal of waste by criminal syndicates has caused widespread environmental pollution.

The air, soil and water contamination has come from the burning and dumping of waste by the so-called ecomafia, and experts believe the pollution is linked to increased rates of cancer and other diseases in the region that are above the national average.

Now trying to cleanse its image and raise public awareness, Naples hosted the 10th International Media Forum on the Protection of Nature earlier this month, organised by the Rome-based environmental group Greenaccord.

Titled ‘People Building Future: A Future Without Waste’, the annual conference brought together experts, journalists and educators from around the world in yet another initiative to emphasise the need to reduce waste to shield the environment, mitigate climate change, and protect health.

“There is sufficient evidence that atmospheric pollution causes cancer,” said Federico Valerio, a scientist at the National Institute for Cancer Research in Genova and a participant in the conference. “We need to change how we deal with environmental pollution.”

Rosario Capone, a teacher at the Osvaldo Conti technical school near Naples, said that both educators and students were fed up with the slow political response to the pollution problems and their impact on health, and she called for urgent political action.

“There are teachers and students at our school who have been diagnosed with cancer, so we personally see the effects,” she told journalists. “We all want to see solutions to the problem.”

Answers at the national level may be slow in coming, however. The Italian government has been involved in a court case with the European Commission over the “inadequate treatment of waste” that is landfilled in the Lazio region north of Naples. The government and the Commission disagree on what constitutes sufficient treatment of waste.

According to the EU, “landfills operating in breach of EU waste legislation constitute a serious threat to human health and the environment.”

The EU wants to phase out landfilling. But in the meantime, Commissioner Potočnik said that the priorities were to reduce the waste generated per person, to maximise recycling and re-use, and to limit incineration to non-recyclable materials.

Besides the court case, the EU is taking regulatory action to get its member states to deal with their waste. Earlier this month, the Commission adopted a proposal that requires states to reduce their use of lightweight plastic carrier bags.

According to the Commission, lightweight plastic bags are often used only once, but they can last in the environment for hundreds of years and are particularly dangerous to marine life.

Potočnik, who launched an exhibition in Brussels last Friday to emphasise the marine aspect, stated, “We’re taking action to solve a very serious and highly visible environmental problem. Every year, more than 8 billion plastic bags end up as litter in Europe, causing enormous environmental damage.

“Some member states have already achieved great results in terms of reducing their use of plastic bags. If others followed suit we could reduce today’s overall consumption in the European Union by as much as 80 percent.”

The Danish government, for instance, imposed taxes on plastic bags and has seen the use of thin plastic bags drop to an estimated four bags per person each year – the lowest in the EU, according to the Commission.

Italians, meanwhile, use a total of about 20 billion plastic bags per year, according to environmentalists, and one only has to glance at the polluted Bay of Naples to see the results.

“The destructive levels of consumption must end,” said William Rees, inventor of the “ecologicial footprint” concept and a keynote speaker at the Naples conference.

“We need to become much more activist regarding the environment, and to push for change,” he told IPS.