The Guardian’s correspondent went into the heart of the plain, to Crotta d’Adda, a village of 600 inhabitants, where for some time the population has lived practically ‘barricaded indoors’.
The cause is ‘the unbearable and potentially harmful stench, which has caused vomiting, breathing difficulties, dizziness, swollen eyes and headaches’ and which comes from the vast area of farmland directly adjacent to their homes.
The hamlet, the newspaper explains, is ‘surrounded by pig and poultry farms, whose waste is turned into fertiliser before being spread in a thick layer over farmland, in a process known as “sludge spreading”.’
The main culprit is the so-called ‘defecation gypsum’, a solid material obtained from the hydrolysis of biological materials using lime and/or sulphuric acid. ‘Although defecation gypsum is considered a versatile product in agriculture, there is a risk that the gypsum may come from material classified as waste and therefore banned from use in fertilisers.’
‘It’s impossible to live like this,’ one resident says despondently to the journalist. ‘You can’t go out, you can’t do anything. Even your home is no longer safe, because the stink gets in everywhere and lasts for weeks. The icing on the cake is that we live in an area surrounded by all the other factors that cause pollution.’
This combination of polluting factors concentrated in a single (and vast) area is in fact the real subject of the Guardian’s report.
‘The Po Valley,’ the writer explains to readers across the Channel, ‘a vast geographical area straddling the northern Italian regions including Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, is among the worst in Europe for air pollution.’
The article recalls how a previous Guardian investigation ‘found that more than a third of the people living in the valley and surrounding areas were breathing air four times above the World Health Organization’s guideline limit for the most dangerous airborne particles’.
In short, even the British are worried about the levels of pollution in hard-working Padania. And they also provide some figures, unlike most of our national media.
‘According to the EEA, poor air quality is linked to 50,303 premature deaths in Italy in 2020, and while most occurred in Milan, Cremona was the Italian province with the highest rate of deaths – between 150 and 200 per 100,000 residents – attributed to fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5.’
The health risks are therefore considerable and very worrying. Maria Grazia Petronio, a representative of ISDE, the Association of Doctors for the Environment, tells the paper that ‘no organ of the body is immune from PM 2.5. We are talking about all types of cancer, respiratory diseases, fertility problems and also cardiovascular diseases. When PM 2.5 is high we see a clear increase in heart attacks.’
If the problem is this serious (and it is), what is being done to address it? What are the institutions, local authorities and national bodies doing? the Guardian asked.
The answer is critical: ‘Although local initiatives such as cycle lanes and restrictions on polluting vehicles have helped to some extent to combat smog in the Po Valley, the authorities are hesitant to take stronger action because it would come at an economic cost.’ Simple and direct, as is the habit of the Anglo-Saxons.
There has been some improvement, the article acknowledges. ‘As part of a plan drawn up together with the authorities of Piedmont, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy’s regional environment councillor, Giorgio Maione, maintains that the region has made good progress in recent years in trying to reduce pollution.
Over the last decade the level of coarse dust (PM10) in Lombardy, a region with more than 10 million inhabitants, has been progressively falling, as has the number of days on which the limit of 50 mg/m3 was exceeded, although in 2022 the limit of 35 days was still exceeded.’
‘Maione,’ the newspaper recalls, ‘said that Lombardy invested €19bn (£16bn) in pollutant reduction initiatives between 2018 and 2022, most of which was spent on improving mobility infrastructure, including incentives that allow residents and businesses to trade in vehicles for cleaner ones.’
And yet the targets the EU has set for 2030 are out of the question as far as their attainment is concerned, the Guardian recalls. It is simply not on the cards.
‘Councillor Maione maintains that the region is making an enormous effort, but that it is impossible to reach the EU’s 2030 air quality targets because of the disadvantage of its geographical position.’ ‘Italy, in fact,’ the British article concludes, ‘is among the countries pushing for the rules to be relaxed.’
