Frauds in the Italian Agro-Food Sector: An Introduction

The paper presents an introductory analysis of agro-food frauds (AFF) in Italy and aims to get some preliminary insights for the improvement of AFF monitoring system. To pursue this objective, we used explorative statistical analysis looking at AFF from various perspectives, analysing them over time, geographically and at the value chain level. The data used are taken exclusively from the Central Inspectorate for Quality Protection and Fraud Repression in Agro-Food Products (Ispettorato Centrale per la Qualità e la Repressioni delle Frodi, ICQRF) of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, which is the major public body specialised in fraud repression in agro-food sector. The analysis shows that the inspection activities carried out by ICQRF have significantly improved from 2007 to 2015 both in terms of sampling and fraud detection. However, there is still room for further improvement. The analysis shows that the ICQRF may consider further investments in Lazio and Lombardy, two regions that are under-covered by inspection activities as compared to the other regions. In addition, a reallocation of the inspection resources from smaller regions (generally featuring with low intensities of irregularity) to larger ones (with higher intensities of irregularity) is expected to further improve the inspection efficiency. The analysis at subsector level shows that wine and olive oil production are the most inspected agro-food activities, given their larger economic sizes and their higher exposure to frauds. Differentiating products by their quality characteristics (organic, designation of origin, and conventional) do not show significant differences across regions, but they did show noticeable relevance across subsectors. Designation of origin products are extremely important for the wine subsector accounting for 66% of the total inspected products, while organic products are relatively more important than those of designation of origin for subsector mostly based on fresh/unprocessed products such as vegetables and cereals. In conclusion, the importance of quality products is dictated by the technical characteristics of each value chain, and these characteristics should be considered in designing inspection sampling.