by Alessandra Cardone
ROME, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Enhancing cooperation with China on food safety is crucial to defend "Made in Italy" products on the global market, according to Italian Agriculture Minister Maurizio Martina.
"It is crucial for Italy to cooperate more and more with China at institutional level," Martina told Xinhua in a recent interview.
"More specifically, we need to strengthen all areas of legislative convergence, in terms of protection and promotion of our (agribusiness) productions, and on some specific plant-health and technical-commercial issues that have to be managed together," he added.
The official made his remarks in an interview on the sidelines of a food safety conference organized by LUISS University and the Chinese embassy in the Italian capital on Tuesday.
Several experts from both countries drew together to discuss the best way to improve food safety, protect culinary excellences in both countries, and fight counterfeit food.
The cooperation between Italy and China in this perspective has been developing within the "Sino-Italian Food Safety Dialogue" since 2013.
"Our ultimate goal is to build an ever deeper partnership, providing our agro-food products to the Chinese context in the right way, and -- at the same time -- recognizing the specificity of the Chinese experience here in Italy," Martina said.
Discussions at the conference also concerned e-commerce, and Martina mentioned the recent agreement signed between Italy and Chinese online platform Alibaba as a model.
"It is an exemplary case on how to create a good interaction between public and private at international level and in a crucial sector such as e-commerce," the minister said.
The agreement was signed in Sept. 2016, setting up a mechanism of both promotion and protection of Made-in-Italy agricultural products for the online sales on the Chinese platform.
Fighting counterfeit food is key to the Italian economy. The food and wine industry is its second largest manufacturing sector, accounting for some 8 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
The agribusiness industry registered a turnout of 132 to 135 billion euros between 2015 and 2017, according to data and forecast by Federalimentare association.
Counterfeiting Italian foods on international markets in 2015 were estimated at over 60 billion euros (67 billion U.S. dollars), a research by Italy's largest farmer association Coldiretti showed.
"I am glad Italy is the country that has been investing more in this partnership so far, and the only country to have built such relationship with a double objective," Martina said. "Promoting our products was not enough for us."
"We asked Alibaba to develop specific protection tools, because the fight against fake Italian foods is a necessary pre-condition to be able to support the real Made in Italy," he said.
As for the further development of the Sino-Italian food safety cooperation overall, the minister said Italy was eager to "handle all technical files on the table with coordinated times and standards".
"Sometimes these are very technical and specific files, and we need to work on them in coordination with Chinese authorities with continuity and speed," Martina said. (1 euro = 1.12 U.S. dollars)
