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The impact of agribusiness crimes on food prices: evidence from Italy

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Abstract

From the 1990s the Italian agribusiness sector is increasingly threatened by a new and dangerous phenomenon: organized crime in the agribusiness sector. The so-called “Agromafia” imposes its control throughout the whole agricultural supply chain, from production to retail, passing through the processing industry, transports and large-scale distribution. In this paper we examine the relationship between eco-crimes and consumer food and non-alcoholic drinks price index for the 20 Italian regions and 80 Italian provinces in the 1998–2016 period. At regional level, as a proxy for the Agromafia’s activities, we build an ad hoc eco-criminal index for every region using data annually elaborated from Legambiente. At province level, as a proxy for Agromafia’s activities, we use eight specific variables: extortions, counterfeiting, contraband, forest fires, all types of fires, money laundering, suspicious money transfers, and an ad hoc eco-criminal index. The analysis shows that the Agromafia can consistently affect the whole agribusiness sector, causing an increase in food prices, especially in south of the country. The ten most affected provinces by phenomenon register a food consumer price index about 12% higher than the least ten affected provinces. By the contrast, in the center-north of Italy money laundering seems to reduce food consumer prices through the reinvestment of illicit proceeds in firms with strong cost advantages.

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Fig. 1

Source: own elaborations on Legambiente data (1999–2017). [created with excel]

Fig. 2

Source: own elaboration on ISTAT data (1998–2016). [created with excel]

Fig. 3

Source: own elaboration on ISTAT data (1998–2016) and Legambiente data (1999–2017). [created with gretl]

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Notes

  1. Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin).

  2. Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Indication).

  3. Specialità Tradizionale Garantita (Traditional Specialty Guaranteed).

  4. The exploitation of natural resources and climate changes are the most important reasons for the structural Italian agribusiness current account deficit of the last 20 years (Carbone and Henke 2012).

  5. See e.g., Arlacchi (1986), Gambetta (1993), Anderson (1995), Gambetta and Reuter (1995), Centorrino et al. (1999), Felli and Tria (2000), Paoli (2002, 2003), Asmundo and Lisciandra (2008), Krkoska and Robeck (2009), Detotto and Vannini (2010), Daniele and Marani (2011), Albanese and Marinelli (2013), Acconcia et al. (2014), Pinotti (2015), Di Gennaro and La Spina (2016), and Blackburn et al. (2017).

  6. In particular, Canali 2012 analyzes different types of counterfeiting in the agri-food sector, and also proposes a simple imitation intensity index.

  7. Cusatelli and Giacalone (2015) concentrate their attention on the illegal activities related to animals, and on crimes against farmers.

  8. A larger body of research has investigated the main determinants of illegal trafficking of wastes and the involvement of organized crime in this specific area of activity (Percoco 2001; Piccolella et al. 2003; Massari and Monzini 2004; Iovino 2010; Ruggiero and South 2010; Corona and Sciarrone 2012; Walters 2013; Martone 2014; Peluso 2015; Germani et al. 2015, 2017).

  9. Coldiretti-Eurispes (2017) estimates an overall damage of 60 billion euros for the “Food Made in Italy”.

  10. Extortion strategy is three-dimensional because it’s perpetrated against farmers, road haulage firms, and retailers and wholesalers.

  11. According to a study carried out by The European House-Ambrosetti (2016, pp. 39, 43) in the agricultural sector would be about 400,000 illegal workers, with an overall rate of irregularities of 22.3% in 2013 (latest figures), compared with 12.8% of the total economy. The damage to the economy is estimated between 2 and 5 billion euros (FLAI-CGIL 2016, pp. 19).

  12. It is useful to stress that wrappings and packages may affect up to 30% the retail price of foods. In some cases, these costs may exceed those of the agricultural product (Coldiretti-Eurispes 2011).

  13. This is an important point because road transport costs almost account for a third of the final sales price.

  14. Sometimes, Mafias can cut entire plantations (Coldiretti-Eurispes 2016).

  15. In 2016 there have been 4,635 illegal actions against wildlife and farm livestock. And about 490 of these regard rustling.

  16. In 2015 there have been 2570 thefts of tractors and other farming equipment, geographically distributed as follows: 136 in the North, 414 in the Center, and 2020 in the Mezzogiorno (Coldiretti-Eurispes 2016).

  17. Just in the 2010–2012 period, 33.1 million euros (out of a total of 52.1 billion euros) of European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) have been stolen by organized crime.

  18. In particular, we refer to Camorra, ‘ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra.

  19. According to Paoli (2003, p. 165), extortions substantially represent a risk-free activity; they do not require significant initial investment and they are simple to manage and improve. So, they are still the main source of funding for Mafias (Scalia 2010; Savona 2012).

  20. About 5.08 billion euros concern the Mafia’s traditional areas of activity (Apulia, Calabria, Campania and Sicily).

  21. Overall, 120,000 retailers are involved in these four regions.

  22. The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) was created in 1991 together with the Direzione Nazionale Antimafia (DNA); they are special investigative services specializing in activities against organized crime.

  23. However, for some goods the increase is even bigger; e.g., the pork chop price per kg can increase by 552.38% from the field to the table, while the price of ham per kg can even grow by 2194.39%. In particular, for each euro spent by consumers, 15.5% is for the farmer and 48.5% ends in the wholesale distribution (Coldiretti’s elaborations on consumers Sms data—Ministry of Agriculture 2009). Generally, farmers earn 15-euro cents for every euro spent in production activities (Coldiretti-Eurispes 2017).

  24. E.g., according to Legambiente (Legambiente 2017a, b, c), every year in the northern periphery of Naples (the so-called Land of Fires) there would be thousands and thousands of little and mid arsons. Furthermore, from 1991 to 2013 Mafias would dump 10 tons of toxic wastes in the same area, with a 400% increase of pathologies directly related to toxic contamination (Fazzo et al. 2008; Iengo and Armiero 2017). In particular, high incidence and mortality rates have been registered for bladder, laryngeal, liver, and lung cancer, and leukemia (Comba et al. 2014).

  25. In the four traditional mafia regions, they account for 47% of the overall environmental crimes.

  26. About 9.72% of these firms belong to food and beverage industry.

  27. According to the authors, when Mafias are well-established in the socio-economic substratum, firms tend to interact with organized crime rather than pursue innovation strategy. Obviously, this leads to a decrease in innovation and competition.

  28. As stated by the authors the percentage of extorted businesses should be only read with respect to businesses belonging to the weak economic subcategories.

  29. This evidence is confirmed by DNA (2016, p. 453), which attests that 45.91% of the 182,038 suspected monetary transactions recorded in 2015 concerned the north of Italy, while 26.49% and 27.60% stemmed from the center of Italy and Mezzogiorno, respectively.

  30. Mafia’s firms are able to rely on huge competitive advantages, which we can sum up by cheap labor, tax evasion, unlimited financial resources available, extensive deregulation, and ability to attract public funding (Ravenda et al. 2015a, b).

  31. In recent years there has also been a rapid increase of a mirror phenomenon, called “money dirtying”. In other words, clean money is progressively invested in profitable criminal activities, especially related to agri-food sector. Mafias accept this kind of relationship because it allows to establish direct contact with institutional players, politicians, successful entrepreneurs, and to hide the drug money (Coldiretti-Eurispes 2013, 2015, 2017).

  32. This limited sample is due to lack of observations for the considered period. In fact, according to ISTAT (2017) not all provinces periodically communicate the data on CPI. Wherever possible, we have reconstructed the partially missing historical series by using the regional data.

  33. This refers both to tacit and opportunistic support to the Mafia system (Mete 2011; Di Gennaro 2016), and to the fact that victims are usually afraid to report crimes to the police because of the Mafia’s retaliations.

  34. In fact, ISTAT just provides data on CPI (https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/16333#1).

  35. In every case, it means all infringements found by the law enforcement. However, further details about these criminal offenses are specifically provided in the Appendix (Table 5).

  36. This is coherent with our analysis. In fact, toxic and hazardous wastes are usually buried in quarries, vast plains and arable land, with a subsequent damage to agriculture such as serious pollution, occupation of the land, and spread of animal infection and disease (Greyl et al. 2009; Legambiente 2017a). Moreover, building speculation and fires against forests and farmland can cause important soil erosion processes, hydrogeological instability, and loss of biodiversity (Legambiente 2017a, b, c). And according to Panagos et al. (2018), in Italy the soil erosion annually reduces agricultural productivity by 619 million euros.

  37. Legambiente doesn’t provide data for environmental crimes at the province level. Only in recent years, Legambiente has started to report data for a small sample of provinces.

  38. Specifically, we mean minimarkets with sales surface area between 200 and 400 square meters, supermarkets with sales surface area of almost 400 square meters, and hypermarkets with sales surface area of almost 2500 square meters (Ministry of Economic Development—Directorate General of Trade, Insurance and Services). About hypermarkets, we just refer to sales space devoted to food.

  39. Speaking of which, I’d like to thank an anonymous referee for the valuable suggestion.

  40. In fact, money laundering is usually one of the most under-reported crime. By using two different sources, we may partially correct this bias and obtain a more efficient index.

  41. The specific methodology and other details will be explained in Sect. 4.

  42. As also shown in Table 9 in the Appendix.

  43. As is well known, the power market along the value chain is not an easy characteristic to investigate. This is confirmed both by Borenstein et al. (1997) and McLaren (2015), which use different approaches to study the phenomenon, and achieve different results. In particular, Borenstein et al. (1997) use cumulative adjustment functions, while McLaren (2015) use a price up dummy. About results, Borenstein et al. (1997) show the presence of asymmetry in the response of the retail gasoline prices to crude oil price changes, compatible with the presence of short-run market power among retailers, and McLaren (2015) confirms the presence of asymmetric price transmission from international to local agricultural markets, consistent with the presence of large intermediaries with monopsony power.

  44. Usually, in traditional criminal areas, firms invest their economic resources in equipment and activities that are unlikely to be destroyed or looted by the Mafia (Kumar and Skaperdas 2008, p. 13–14).

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Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 here.

Table 7 Some descriptive statistics for Italian provinces (1998–2016)
Table 8 Variance inflation factor (VIF) for OLS models
Table 9 Correlation matrix, using observations 1–80; 5% critical values (two-tailed) = 0.2199 for n = 80

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Perone, G. The impact of agribusiness crimes on food prices: evidence from Italy. Econ Polit 37, 877–909 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-019-00165-5

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