THE OPPORTUNITY
The opportunity is not only to accelerate the technological modernization of the entire agri-food sector, the most important economic sector in the country, but, by means of this transformation, to promote in the country all those ethical and operational practices that are at the basis of agrifood-tech revolution: from innovation to sustainability, from transparency to merit, from collaboration to networking.
THE GAP WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD
Italy is undoubtedly the world's leader in food experience, with its national agrifood sector generating a turnover of about half a trillion euros (over 25% of the Italian GDP. CREA, 2021).
Yet, even though venture capital in agrifood-tech is booming worldwide, counting 30 billion invested just last year (+ 30% in 2019), the country remains drastically lagging when it comes to startups. 2019's data shows Italy saw just $ 21M of investments (out of a total of $ 20 billion globally)(AgFunder, 2020), 0.1% of the capital invested globally in the sector.
Despite the dramatic limits of access to capital, Italy can produce world leaders in agrifood-tech. In the Global FoodTech500 2020 ranking drawn up by Forward Fooding, Italian startups represent 6.8% of the global total (to be compared with just 0.1% of the capital raised, above). Italy, therefore, has the potential to allocate at least 50 times the capital ($ 1 billion per year) to this sector than it currently does.
The damage caused to the country by this delay is enormous. Suffice it to say that, for every dollar invested in (healthy) venture capital, the long-term return would exceed $ 6 in annual revenues; we are therefore already losing almost half a percentage point of GDP in the long run. Let's also consider the benefits to the agrifood production system, where agrifood-tech innovations lead to increases in revenues and cost efficiency greater than two percentage figures. The price we risk paying is much higher (at least 3 percentage points of GDP ).
And it doesn't stop there. Italy, which represents the 2nd or 3rd EU agrifood producer (according to the calculation methods), runs severe risks of irrelevance in the face of structural changes at a global level in production methods and demand.
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