"Short Food Supply Chain" and Promotion of Local Food in EU and Italian Law

This chapter intends to highlight how the emergence of EU and Italian interest in local food plays an important role in changing the criteria for choosing which forms of the "short supply chain" will be incentivised in the agro-food system. The fact that the "short supply chain" has become an instrument of policies aimed at promoting local food consumption is the result of various reasons which overlap those that have traditionally driven economic sector studies and supported initial national legislation on the direct sale of products by farmers. The nature of the "new" reasons are both environmental, such as the reduction of transport emissions or food waste, and socio-economic, such as the development of local production and recovery of the direct citizen-farmer relationship with implications also for food safety. This is evident at European level, as evidenced by the rural development policy for 2014-2020 and the European Commission report on the adoption of a new local farming and direct sales labelling scheme, and also at an Italian level in recent regional measures.