December is a month that has always been significant for the promoting committee of the PGI Bergamotto di Reggio. In December 2023, the ministerial approval of the PGI was celebrated, then blocked by the Region the following February.
The second ministerial approval was celebrated in December 2024, which was followed in January 2025 by the final public assessment meeting of the process. A process that began in 2021 and which, with the publication in the Official Journal on 16 October of the Regulations for the PGI Bergamotto di Reggio Calabria, could be said to have been concluded at an Italian level. Brussels approval would have to follow. But here it is again in December, this time in 2025, in which the Promoting Committee for the PGI Bergamotto di Reggio Calabria was busy responding to the objections received against the PGI, permitted by law, and now working against yet another appeal to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court presented against the PGI and against the Ministry of Agriculture by the PDO team.
For the agronomist Rosario Previtera, president of the promoting committee for the PGI active since 2021 «the consortium for the protection of the PDO essential oil together with the same well-known protagonists who oppose the conclusion of the PGI process have specific objectives: to postpone obtaining the PGI as much as possible to keep the prices of bergamot low, not to lose the dominant positions consolidated for decades, to ensure that the sector remains as firm and immobile as a century back. We are forced once again to waste resources, energy and time as we are busy with court matters. And in the meantime the bergamot growers are suffering as is the historic center of the Bergamot Consortium in Arenella di San Gregorio, an example of industrial archeology to be valorised, which we are told is in a complete state of abandonment and almost in an irreversible phase for potential recovery, in the general silence of bodies and institutions”.
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