Development Strategies and Competitiveness of the Food Industry in Italy

The food sector, in all the advanced countries, presents an important quantitative dimension, in terms of production, net output and employment. Obviously, the internal system’s composition changes in the course of time: the relative importance of agriculture decreases, whilst the farms increase their average size and their degree of productive specialization, in the direction of a complete opening to the market and of an increasing interdependence between agriculture and the other parts of the system. On the other side the food industry becomes more important, and particularly increases the relevance of those industries which present products with a high transformation level: it grows the companies’ dimension and the concentration of the distributive sector, that tends to become a strategic part in the food system.