Cities
Single-city data
Comparative data
Production
In 1990, the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano (South Milan Agricultural Park) was established to preserve 47.000 hectares of agricultural areas in the south and southeast of the Metropolitan City of Milan. Today, much of the food production occurs in this protected area and consists mainly of milk, maize, and rice. Production is strongly oriented towards arable crops, such as maize and fodder, used for cattle feed. Livestock farms are primarily dedicated to cattle farms, followed to a lesser extent by horse, pig, and poultry farms. The leading end products are milk and the meat of surplus animals. The milk produced is almost entirely sent to the processing industry to be sold as drinking milk or processed into cheese or other dairy products. In contrast, rice, which represents one of the traditional products of the lower Po Valley area, is milled and destined entirely for human consumption. Food production figures for the Metropolitan City of Milan rely on a mix of sources. Agricultural and milk production values are provided at the level of the Metropolitan City, respectively, by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, 2018) for 78 types of crops and fresh produce and by the Italian Dairy Economic Consulting firm that analyses the Dairy Market (2018). Data on meat production are provided by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, 2018) at a higher territorial level of the Region. It was, therefore, necessary to find a proxy value to scale down the estimates to the metropolitan level. The percentage of meat produced in the Metropolitan City of Milan was deduced by assuming the number of livestock reared in the metropolitan area compared to the one reared in the entire region using data from the agricultural census "Livestock by agricultural unit location" available for the year 2010 only (ISTAT, 2010). Manufactured food and beverages are not included.
Data Quality Indicators
| Reliability | 1 | Verified data based on measurements |
|---|---|---|
| Completeness | 2 | Representative data from a smaller number of sites but for adequate periods |
| Temporal correlation | 5 | Age of data unknown or more than five years of difference |
| Geographical correlation | 2 | Average date from larger area in which the area under study is included and with which it shares comparable conditions. |
| Access | 1 | Publicly and readily available data |
| Frequency | 5 | No scheduled data collection interval |
| Informality and illegality | 2 | Illegal or informal flows estimated at no more than 5% |
| Classification compatibility | 2 | Data classified using a different yet compatible classification system |
Food supply
In the absence of measured data, the food supply of the Metropolitan City of Milan was calculated based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) “Food balance sheet” for Italy (2018). Food balance sheets provide data on the national average of food available for human consumption during a specified reference period. This includes the total quantity of foodstuffs produced (including production, imports, and stock changes) minus exports, food use other than human feed (including animal feed, seeds for agricultural use, etc.), and food losses during food transport, storage, and processing. It also includes post-consumer food waste.
Data Quality Indicators
Consumption
As for many European cities, no city-level food consumption data are available for the Metropolitan City of Milan. The metropolitan city's food consumption was estimated using the national food consumption survey INRAN-SCAI 2005-2006 (Leclercq et al., 2009), as already done by Pulighe and Lupia (2019) and by Corbin and colleagues (2021) for the capital city of Milan. The 2005-2006 survey remains the largest conducted on household food consumption habits in Italy, comprising a sample of 1300 households (3328 individuals). It presents the mean, standard deviation, median, and high percentiles of individual daily consumption in grams per day for fifteen major categories and fifty-one sub-categories of food and beverages in the total population distinguished by age and gender. The total consumption in the Metropolitan City of Milan is estimated by multiplying the average survey data by the number of inhabitants by age group and gender provided by the National Institute of Statistics for this area (ISTAT, 2018).
Data Quality Indicators
| Reliability | 1 | Verified data based on measurements |
|---|---|---|
| Completeness | 1 | Representative data from a sufficient sample of sites over an adequate period to even out normal fluctuations |
| Temporal correlation | 5 | Age of data unknown or more than five years of difference |
| Geographical correlation | 2 | Average date from larger area in which the area under study is included and with which it shares comparable conditions. |
| Access | 1 | Publicly and readily available data |
| Frequency | 5 | No scheduled data collection interval |
| Informality and illegality | 1 | No illegal or informal flows, or they are fully included |
| Classification compatibility | 2 | Data classified using a different yet compatible classification system |
Food loss and waste
The food waste figure corresponds to the organic waste collected through household separate collection in the 133 municipalities in the Metropolitan City of Milan. Data are provided by the National Waste Register of the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) expressed in tonnes per year and municipality. Although these data do not include food waste collected with residual waste, the high rate of separate collection introduced in Milan and its surrounding municipalities a decade ago makes it possible to assume that this represents a significant fraction of food waste. It results in a per capita production of 110 kg/inhabitant/year, higher than the estimated food waste in Europe by FAO of 90 kg/inhabitant/year (Gustavsson et al., 2011). On the other hand, as no data are available for food losses at the supply stage (prior consumption), the food loss figure for the Metropolitan City of Milan relies on the estimated/assumed waste percentage for six commodity groups at the step of distribution: supermarket and retail for Europe provided as Annex 4 by the 2011 FAO Global Food Losses and Food Waste (Gustavsson et al., 2011).
Data Quality Indicators
| Reliability | 2 | Verified data partly based on assumptions or non-verified data based on measurements |
|---|---|---|
| Completeness | 2 | Representative data from a smaller number of sites but for adequate periods |
| Temporal correlation | 5 | Age of data unknown or more than five years of difference |
| Geographical correlation | 2 | Average date from larger area in which the area under study is included and with which it shares comparable conditions. |
| Access | 1 | Publicly and readily available data |
| Frequency | 5 | No scheduled data collection interval |
| Informality and illegality | 2 | Illegal or informal flows estimated at no more than 5% |
| Classification compatibility | 4 | Data classified using a different classification system that is not fully compatible; more than 50% of the data require reclassification |