How to respond to the problem of plant shortages and therefore fill the demand for plants from public tenders and private projects? With a solution that seems simple, but is not without its problems: growing plants in Italy. Thus the Assofloro association asks to reflect on the Italian forest nursery production.
“It is hard to listen to the concrete proposal of wanting to grow them in Italy”.
The second-level Association present at national level in the nursery gardening and landscape sector takes a position, highlighting a situation that risks further worsening the already complex finding of trees to meet the notices of the PNRR and due to the increasingly numerous forestation and reforestation, and promotes an initiative to find a concrete solution in a short time, in order to respond to the requests that derive from the launch of projects supported by public tenders and also by private entities.
"The horticultural entrepreneurial system does not intend to lose the important opportunity given by the PNRR in the field of forestation" says Nada Forbici, President of Assofloro, "but it is certain that it will be like this if there is no correct consultation between the institutions and the productive world" . "We can understand, in this initial stage of starting forestation projects, the choice of the Mite to have the first tranche of trees cultivated by December 2022 in a single regional nursery, given the total absence of planning also by the vast majority of Metropolitan Cities but we certainly cannot accept that this becomes the solution for the plants that will be planted by 2024 and then 2026. Nor do we accept that the plants are grown by Vivai d'Oltralpe with our seeds, as seems to be happening” .
To stimulate cultivation in Italy, underlines Assofloro, it is necessary to immediately start planning crops in collaboration with the National Biodiversity Centers of the Carabinieri, which hold quality propagation materials of certain origin, and with the Regional Nurseries, which have large experience and ability in terms of germination and first cultivation of young plants, to coordinate with them the growth action in our production sites. In this way we can quickly put on the market the right plant, healthy and controlled from a phytosanitary point of view, with the guarantee of certified origin.
“What we ask”, continues Forbici, “is that the National Plan of Resistance and Resilience can also be really useful for the Italian nursery system, so that companies can resist and continue to employ the large necessary manpower. And in addition to the cultivation of forest manure, it is also necessary that the planting and care of the trees right from their implantation is entrusted and carried out by local agricultural and artisan flower-nursery companies, because unfortunately even this specification is not always present in the few tenders so far gone out".