Neglected agro-forest food in public procurement

Roughly 37% of the Italian peninsula is covered by forests and woods: although crucial to our environmental balance for their impactful eco-system functions, forests have been widely under-exploited as to food production both in industrial and post-industrial Italy. This project aims at mapping fringe/forest food chains (current as well as past ones) in order to measure, set up and enhance their connections with any urban food landscape. The main idea is to recover a socio-economic relevance for inland areas by boosting the forest's role in current food consumption styles and eating habits and also as a well-established and historical coping strategy in the increasing droughts as climate change consequences.
The economic potential of these areas, through food, biodiversity and seed-diversity has so far been nearly neglected by studies on the Italian context; the literature on the subject tends to be rather descriptive, with little insight into historical and anthropological dynamism.

Staple crops currently dominate agricultural production and global food supplies. Seed, crops and diets around the globe are becoming more standardized. These new dietary habits have led to the neglect of about 7000 plant species. 
The project aimed to shed some light on public food policies focusing on the production, commercialisation and consumption of the so-called neglected and underutilized agro-forest food species in inland areas. These neglected agro-forest plants are locally adapted to challenging environments and domesticated by local communities. Domestication of new plants is one of the key phenomena in agro-forest food. The project case studies will analyze, among other foci, how wild plants are becoming tamed and in this way how they are saving genetic diversity.

The investigation, through mapping, ethnographic case studies and elaboration of social and agronomic taxonomy, would focus on nomenclatures and shared taxonomies that come out of local and historical perspectives and cultural patterns. The analysis of this particular culinary order enables to open new scenarios of interpretation that could also help to connect local agricultural knowledge, the fiduciary exchanges as well as the marketing local relationships.
The project outputs will be able to re-define the rhetoric between the pole of natural wild, traditional and local food and the pole of industrial, urban, commercialized food. Rather than a sheer dichotomy, metropolitan and wilderness territories are here expected to set a close, mutual and beneficial interplay recalling the one in place in pre-industrial times.

Finally, despite some investment in research projects on forest and wood agri-food production, the role of these peculiar products in public procurement has so far been rather negligible.

• Mapping historical and traditional forest food chains throughout Alps and Apennines areas.
• Listing of (historically certified) recoveries of product chains with biodiversity relevance and extinct economic value.
• Case studies selection (at least three for Northern, Central and Southern Italy) and ethnographic field work (a qualitative analysis that from the local perspective can lead to broader national and global understandings).
• Coordination of experimental actions of forest/fringe food produce including product processing, transport and trade.
• Awareness-raising campaign addressed to the large public on the sustainability of forest food consumption.
• An innovative food policy approach confirming forest food as part of the new priorities in public procurement.

The main goals of the project are to use public procurement policies in order to: 

1) reshape the socio-economic potential of inland/pedmont/forest areas; recovery and relaunch niche products stemming from non agriculture-vocated areas;

2) create an open access database with nomenclatures and shared taxonomies that come out of local and historical perspectives and cultural patterns;

3) enhance the non-timber forest system, focusing on berries, nuts, fruit, mushrooms, shepherding supply chains; 

4) implement the cultivation of minor species such as rye and perennial wheat and legumes, suitable for disadvantaged contexts, with the aim of expanding the basket of cultivable species in inland areas, with a special focus on the intragenetic diversity (different varieties of species);

5) boost local employment and counteract the massive depopulation of these areas.