Anthropogenic Soils and Soil Security: environmetal and economic consideration.

Since ancient times Man and Soil have experienced interwoven links. Nowadays soil scientists continue to stress such links highlighting the importance of soil to provide man’s growing demand for food, water and energy, and also the soil’s importance in providing ecosystem services that affect climate change, human health and biodiversity. In soil management for agricultural purposes, pedotechniques to tailor soils suitable for table grapes cultivation in large-scale farming are used to get substantial financial returns. However farmers, in tailoring soils for high income crops, frequently do not take into account the fundamental objective of the pedotechnique, i. e. to meet the needs of man…

Quality certifications’ impact on wine industry assets performance

This study analyses the impact of third-party voluntary certifications on the asset of wineries operating in the Southern Italian regions. The study carried out both quantitative and qualitative approaches, with data extracted from the AIDA Bureau van Dijk International Database (including performance indicators). The analysed sector belongs to 11.02 ‘Manufacture of wine from grape’ of the Statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community (NACE). The econometric elaboration (regression) was carried out by means of STATA software 14. Comparing certified and no certified wineries, results show a better asset performance of certified wineries, confirmed by a positive …

Main intrinsic factors driving land grabbing in the African countries’ agro-food industry

Land grabbing is a phenomenon that has spread widely over the last two decades and which involves rich and emerging countries and international companies as protagonists in the large-scale acquisition of land in developing countries. Through the development of an econometric model that takes into account the annual size of land grabbing in the African countries, the research aims to understand the main intrinsic factors, linked to the hosting countries, that guide the large-scale acquisition of land by foreign investors. Results show that the presence of a high debt towards foreign organisations, the high availability of virgin lands, the strong vocation of the hosting country for the culti…

The phenolic compounds of olive oil and human health

Valutazione dell'impatto della riforma Fischler sulla produzione del grano duro in Sicilia

Situazione attuale e prospettive economiche delle piante officinali in Sicilia