Direct selling and alternative evolutionary patterns in the Italian agri-food systems

In the last twenty years the study of alternative food networks (AFNs) gained growing attention and many scholars argue that this is part of a deep transformation of our agri-food systems towards sustainability (Goodman, 2003; Sonnino and Marsden, 2006; Tregear, 2011). In this paper, we study the on-farm and regional factors affecting the farmer's choice to partecipate to AFNs in Italy. Differently to previous studies (Aguglia et al., 2011) we use data on the entire farms’ population, in Italy which is available from the Census of Agriculture carried out by Istat (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica) in 2010 (about 1,653,000 farms). The research questions that this paper follows to answer are then: among the whole universe of Italian farms, which are those that started the transition? Which farm and/or farmer characteristics’ increase the probability to operate on AFNs? Which regional context do positively affect the spread among farmers of a direct marketing with consumers? Some preliminary results are presented at the end of the paper.