At a time when public discourse is saturated with talk of economic sovereignty and breaking free from external dependencies, the announcement of a €3 million Italian grant to “boost the tomato value chain” sounds like an admission of weakness—if not a glaring contradiction. For a state that champions sovereignism and self-sufficiency, reaching out for help with a basic horticultural crop like tomatoes raises a fundamental question: can you truly call yourself sovereign when you depend on Europe to grow your own tomatoes?
Self-sufficiency cannot be financed from abroad
True sovereignty is not bought with subsidies or foreign loans, no matter how they are dressed up as “development cooperation.” If a country chooses the path of autonomy, it must embrace the mechanisms that come with it: mobilising national savings, reallocating its own budget priorities, and trusting its local ingenuity. The tomato is neither a cutting-edge microprocessor nor space technology requiring complex Western know-how. It is a crop that local farmers have mastered for generations. Throwing millions of euros from Rome at small-scale irrigation or processing units reveals a chronic inability to structure our own economy with our own resources. It perpetuates the cycle of aid, now wrapped in a new managerial jargon.
Food and security planning: a glaring void
Beyond the ideological inconsistency, this project highlights a much more serious problem: a complete lack of seriousness in strategic planning, both in food and security terms. How can you design a viable three-year agricultural development plan in structurally unstable areas without strict coordination with territorial security? Developing production zones without first ensuring the safe free movement of goods and people is sheer amateurism. Small-scale irrigation infrastructure, however costly, will be useless if farmers cannot access their fields or if harvests are abandoned due to security threats. Moreover, the lack of planning is evident in the management of the value chain:
- The diagnosis is well known: the country produces in bulk from January to June, then loses everything due to lack of storage, while importing tomato concentrate for the rest of the year.
- The response is short-sighted: instead of building a genuine national agri-food industry financed by local capital or endogenous public-private partnerships, the country relies on external funds to “plug the gaps.”
For a genuine break
If the chosen sovereignist path is serious, it demands a radical break from these practices. Revitalising the tomato sector—or any other strategic sector—requires rigorous planning that links land security, patriotic financing, and protection of the domestic market against massive imports. Continuing to celebrate €3 million envelopes from Europe keeps the country in a facade of sovereignty, where the rhetoric is autarkic but the plates remain dependent on the goodwill of Western capitals. It is time to move from posturing to real planning.
