No fear of Italian Wheat Industry

Today, we drove from Catania down to Agrigento... about 200 klms of easy driving through the wheat district of Sicily. Sicily has played a strategic role as the bread-bowl for both Greece and Rome... but from what I could see, Australian producers need not lie awake at night worrying about the size of the Italian crop. It didn't have the mass or the productivity to worry our mob.

The biggest paddock I could see looked less than 500 hectares. Most of the paddocks were on hillsides... some quite steep... not the terrain for running a large combined harvester. The crop had been harvested a few weeks ago... and farmers were now baling the stubble. The areas were picturesque... but there were not many signs of prosperity... the homesteads looked modest, the farm machinery looked like model released a decade ago.

To remain viable, the farmers may have been cropping a specialised strain of wheat... perhaps (more likely)... the farmers were enjoying EU subsidies.

Of equal interest to the farmland was the road over which we travelled. Much of the road was raised above a broad valley floor... sitting on stilts some 15 metres above the land. Joye and I tried to run some numbers that justified adopting such an expensive engineering solution to problems that were not apparent. Surely the solution of laying down a traditional four lane highway at ground level would be more effective. Then again, perhaps far less land is needed for a raised roadway... perhaps farmers would sell rights to use their land at a lesser price if their farm was not interrupted by a road on the land... so they could graze their animals... plough their fields... drive home for lunch... without the impermeable barrier of a highway sitting on ground across their farm.

We wondered if the advantages of uniform production worked in favour of a raised roadway. While some variation would be needed in the construction of the footings for the road, the surface was of a uniform nature. The factory churning out the elevated road surface would not need too much innovation in construction.

We wondered if time was of the essence. Perhaps the negotiations with local councils and landowners was less complicated when selling the raised road solution.

But the most likely explanation was based on a more sinister view of the world. Agrigento has a reputation of having been a stronghold of mafia influence. Perhaps, part of the explanation for the raised roadway is that it was a 'special project' that was designed and built on a cost-benefit analysis that defied the standard arithmetic constraining infrastructure works in other parts of the world.