 Well, back now to tonight's main news, and I'm sorry if you're enjoying your dinner, but the Food Standards Agency says the discovery of horse meat in a finda's beef lasagna is appalling, but maintains there's no immediate health risks to the public. Meat products from across Europe have been found to be contaminated with horse meat. Horse meat is being passed off as beef for kebabs and burgers in Britain. They may never know exactly how many people have unwittingly eaten horse meat labeled as beef. We're very sorry this has happened. The consumption of meat processed drops by 30%. This story is remembered as the Horse Meat Scandal, and it has shown that we don't know the huge amounts of meat before arriving on our tables. In the case of the Horse Meat Scandal, it went like this. TESCO orders a burger with a French company. The French company opposes the order to an establishment in Luxembourg, but it's said in Luxembourg that it doesn't have meat, so it's ordered from the south of France. The French establishment doesn't have meat, so it's ordered by a Cypriot supplier, who sometimes buys meat from a Dutch distributor. From the Netherlands, they're sent to Bovini, live horses to a macello in Romania. The Romanian butcher then sends the macello meat to the French establishment, which is sent in Luxembourg, where it's finally transformed into a burger and then shipped to TESCO. Do you also turn to TESCO? Everything to buy the raw material costs less, but in this big tour it becomes difficult to get to the province, and it's easy to spend a product for another one. This leaves a white paper on the frode and makes me wonder, but then our food, how does it arrive? To understand it, we went to the Netherlands, in the neutral centre of the food transport, the Rotterdam port. For 42 km, it's the biggest port in Europe, and it's grown by a few steps in our consumption. Peter Van de Larn, the director of Rotterdam FruitWare, one of the main import and export ports in Europe. Every year, about 30,000 ships pass through this port, and all of this has been made possible to advance technology, like the container that was introduced in the 1950s. With the refrigerated container, it has been possible to industrialise the food transport, which today is moved, mainly by the sea, from one side to the other of the planet. In Europe, we import the most fruit, only in 2020, 27 tonnes per minute have arrived. At the beginning of its journey, after it has been collected, it passes through a quality control made by the producer. During the journey, the fruits are separated and we go to sleep. And the oxygen is replaced with nitrogen to delay their maturation. No apples and kiwis together, because apples are producing 80-layne gas. 80-layne gas starts the ripening process immediately of the kiwis. We check the temperature. If the temperature is up to the requirements of the fruit, nothing happens. We do the phytosanitary inspection, and when that is done, the goods can be picked up to go free into Europe. This can be loaded. Then we start discharging the pellets into the cold store and we give away the empty container to the depot. The last step is to remove the pellets that will be delivered directly to the supermarkets. You see Lithuania, you see Poland, and you see Italy. However, by doing research, I found this map. And I realized that when we talk about how the food arrives, you can't just talk about its movements. But you also have to keep in mind everything that is used to produce it. To better understand it, I spoke with Professor Rob Zwidwick, expert in global distribution chains. Anything that you would like to associate with this red meat is dependent on whatever happens here. What we get is a web of connections. Chemicals are maybe produced here, but they will also source from different parts of the world, creating this web of connections. And it's getting confusing and that's exactly the point. The world market is under the control of only four companies. Half of the world's cheese is produced with bacteria and enzymes of a single company. A beer on four is under the monopoly of a single producer. Brazil is responsible for 50% of the export of sugar and five countries represent almost 70% of the export of grain. In other words, only a handful of countries and companies have the monopoly of the global trade of some products. Today we face a beastly phenomenon of delocalization of agriculture, so we eat things obviously cultivated by the other part of the world. This system so complex and industrialized is not to be demonized. We always have access to food that comes from all over the world in perfect conditions. And countries no longer have to worry about producing all the food they need internally. All this thanks to an extremely efficient and controlled system which is so efficient and fragile. We do realize that those fantastic global supply chains that we have built also show some risks that are difficult to control and are difficult to oversee. In just two years a sanitary crisis, a logistics crisis and a policy showed that this system can be affected by problems that we often cannot predict. For example, we take the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine was called the grain of the world. It represented more than 30% of all the importation of grain in Europe. But when Russia blocked the exportation it attracted the main source of supply of many countries. The global problem of this crisis, however, was the increase in the price of gas. That exporters of bananas, for instance, can continue to have a profitable business. Then we have to stop our business. We have a third of all the food we produce. Almost half of the waste comes before the food reaches the supermarket. In South Africa, for example, 165 kg of food per person is wasted every year. But only five of these are wasted indirectly by the consumer. The rest is thrown away before they can buy it. In Europe, the proportions are very different. Each year, 280 kg of food is wasted per person. However, the consumer is wasted directly by the consumer. Another thing we can see from this graph is that the waste of food before the consumer reaches the supermarket is more or less homogeneous around the world. But the waste along the line comes from poor countries due to lack of infrastructure such as transportation and refrigeration. While in rich countries, for the standard, all that is not perfectly aligned with our aesthetic tastes are wasted. Another problem is the emissions. This study has calculated the impact of the whole branch, including machinery and raw materials that are needed to prove it. The result is that today 20% of the total emissions of the food system are represented. And as usual, most of these come from industrialized countries. On the one hand, the system is causing emissions and thereby impacting climate change. On the other hand, climate change is also impacting the system, especially the food system. And that could be indeed a vicious cycle because you are creating a lot of emissions and not creating so much food. Another big problem is the fraud and illegality. What happened with Tesco and with the horse meat is certainly not an isolated case. A study conducted on a large scale showed that in Europe a fish on three does not correspond to what was declared on the package. In the United States, they found wood pulp at the Parmesan's place. But the most black chapter of the food fraud was seen in 2009, when Stuart Barnell sold burro di arachidi contaminated by Salmonella killing seven people and hurting hundreds of people. Just one person who tries to take a shortcut to get to catastrophic consequences. The issue that leads to all these problems is that of responsibility. Because in such an intricate system it is easier to do it frankly. For example, unloading the blame on someone else to hide their mistakes. The European Union is trying to find a solution and is evaluating a law that will determine who sells the final product responsible for what happens throughout the whole branch. But the problem is how it is possible to apply a law of this type in a system that is essentially opaque. When the food comes in and you pick it up how much can you see of the chain that the food has gone through up to that moment? For us, nothing. To solve the problem of fraud blockchain. Blockchain is the technology that has made it possible to create transparency between all the transactions in the Bitcoin trade. Who proposes it for the food system says that we can create a transparent record for all the steps that the branch is taking. But the problem when it comes to trackability is not only in the digital part it is above all in the physical part. The food is physical and therefore there will always be someone to reduce the information from the physical to the digital and vice versa. What could happen is that more or less fraudulent the fruit or the burger are associated with a label that is wrong with transparency, with transparency. Blockchain does not allow me to guarantee that the quality of the data is correct, it only allows me to create a record shared between non-modifiable parts. The other horse of battle that you can hear speak as a solution to the problems is the Kilometre Zero. But after what we have seen what can be defined local? That's an interesting question. Of course if you grow a certain food you might say the food is grown locally but to claim that everything that you need to produce that is sourced locally will maybe to be one step too far. If I grow at Kilometre Zero so next to my house on January inside a warm, illuminated mountain I am using a quantity of resources that is not sustainable. And then because we are deeply dependent on each other it is impossible to think of a solution for which every country produces everything for itself. I think it's important to diversify. To do local production next to global production So it must be, for example, integrated with a speech of this journalism. Eat what the land is able to give you at that time of the year. But if we pretend that all the annals of the branch take their own responsibilities we also have to take ours. To understand how food arrives and what are the problems linked to our distribution systems has made me reflect on how I contribute to the problems I have talked about. And above all what could I do to solve them? For example, I could stop giving so much weight to the food aesthetics. I could try to waste as little as possible buying only what I know that I will be able to eat. Then it is true that not all have the same possibilities to choose and to change our consumption. Each of us can do a evaluation of how much it contributes to the problem and how many habits it could change. Understand this we need the will. And no matter how many steps we can make in this story we have not talked about who makes all this system possible the workers. To better understand what is behind we went to know who really pays the price of what we eat. Thank you.