The competitiveness of Italian agri-food on international markets at the time of COVID

Italy

Market & Price Trends

Innovation & Technology

Ricardo Lopes

Published Dec 18, 2020

Global scenarios and focus on the wine market

The analysis of the global scenario of Italian agri-food has shown that Italy ranks ninth among the main exporting countries of the world agri-food sector and in third place - after China and Spain - among those that have seen an higher growth of agri-food products exports in the last decade.
In Europe, only Spain has done better than Italy in terms of increase in the value of exports: + 44% from 2012 to today, compared to + 40% of Italian companies. The agri-food sector has become a leading sector for Italian exports over the last decade, covering almost 10% of total exports of goods and services with 44.5 billion euros.

If Covid on the one hand slowed down this race (+ 2.8% exports in the first 9 months of 2020), on the other it improved Italy trade balance, generating a surplus of almost 1.5 billion euros compared to a historic structural deficit.

Among the various sectors of the Made in Italy agri-food sector, there were products such as dry semolina pasta which saw a surge in requests from abroad (+ 23.6% from January to September this year), others that were more affected of the strong restrictions imposed on the Ho.re.ca. Among the latter wines, in particular, which from being the most dynamic segment of Made in Italy, suffered a 3.4% decline in exports in value, more marked for sparkling wines (-8.3%) than other types (-2.3%).

The reduction in foreign demand for some products has had a negative impact on the exports of some highly specialized regions for those productions; this is the case of Friuli-Venezia Giulia which has suffered greatly from the lower foreign demand for sparkling wines, of Liguria due to the drop in exports of plants and flowers, of Sardinia penalized by the decline in pecorino cheese sales, especially in the USA. Covid, on the other hand, has pushed the growth of exports especially in the southern regions, with particular reference to Molise, Basilicata and Campania thanks to the good performance of the pasta sector.

The Covid effect also made itself felt on the range of action of exports, reversing, in the first nine months of 2020, a growth that until 2019 was favoring non-EU destinations (+ 12.7% on 2018) and less countries closer (+ 2.6%). On the contrary, in the first months of the year, shipments to European partners grew by 3.6% against 1% for third countries.