The Istituto agronomico per l'oltremare (IAO) (Overseas Agronomic Institute) in Florence, Italy, is a technical and scientific body of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with 383,084 inhabitants in 2013, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.
The Farnesina or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation is the foreign ministry of the government of the Republic of Italy. It is also known as the Farnesina as a metonym from its headquarters, the Palazzo della Farnesina in Rome. Enzo Moavero Milanesi is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, taking office in June 2018.
The Institute was established in 1904 in Florence by Italian agronomists and tropicalists as the Istituto Agricolo Coloniale Italiano (Italian Colonial Institute), in order to promote the study and systematization of the tropical environment and agriculture and to implement vocational education and training of technicians and migrants, in the agricultural field.[1]
The tropics are the region of the Earth surrounding the Equator. They are delimited in latitude by The Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at 23°26′12.4″ (or 23.43679°) N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at 23°26′12.4″ (or 23.43679°) S; these latitudes correspond to the axial tilt of the Earth. The tropics are also referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone. The tropics include all the areas on the Earth where the Sun contacts a point directly overhead at least once during the solar year - thus the latitude of the tropics is roughly equal to the angle of the Earth's axial tilt.
Agriculture is the science and art of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture into the twenty-first.
The institute was very busy in the years between the two World Wars, under the leadership of Armando Maugini.[2][3] It studied the agricultural and economic issues of Italian colonies and trained the technicians in charge of the economic valorization of the colonies and other regions. In 1938 the institute changed its name, becoming the Istituto agronomico per l'Africa Italiana. After the Second World War, the institute shifted its focus to the technical assistance to the Italians migrating to Latin America on agricultural topics. In 1959 the Institute received its present name[4] and was assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[5]
Armando Maugini was an Italian agronomist and tropicalist. Maugini shaped and directed the activities of the Istituto agricolo coloniale italiano, presently the Istituto agronomico per l'oltremare in Florence for forty years.
Organization
The gardens with the greenhouses
The IAO mandate is to study, train, advise, and support initiatives dealing with tropical and sub-tropical agriculture and environmental protection.
Environmental protection is the practice of protecting the natural environment by individuals, organizations and governments. Its objectives are to conserve natural resources and the existing natural environment and, where possible, to repair damage and reverse trends.
It is active in the field of development co-operation in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. It runs agricultural development projects in developing countries, mainly on behalf of the Direzione generale per la cooperazione allo sviluppo of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The institute was very active in international co-operation after the enactment of Law n. 49 (1987) framing "Italian Development Co-operation", and since then it has mainly been dealing with agricultural and rural development topics, conservation and promotion of agricultural biodiversity and the development of sustainable agricultural technologies. The IAO collaborates with agricultural institutions, research centers, academies, associations and rural communities. The institute directly funds small research programs on farming and the environment, in collaboration with research centers from developing countries and hosts vocational training courses, on such topics as irrigation and geomatics. It is endowed with a teledetection and environmental analysis laboratory and owns the Bonistallo Farm in Poggio a Caiano, in the Province of Florence. Training courses have included field stages in Tuscany, the islands of Elba and Sardinia, and in the developing countries in which the institute has field activities including Bolivia, China, Eritrea, Morocco, and Tunisia.
Africa is the world's second largest and second most-populous continent, being behind Asia in both categories. At about 30.3 million km2 including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area. With 1.2 billion people as of 2016, it accounts for about 16% of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognised sovereign states (countries), nine territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. The majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, with a substantial portion and number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
Latin America is a group of countries and dependencies in the Western Hemisphere where Romance languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French are predominantly spoken; it is broader than the terms Ibero-America or Hispanic America. The term "Latin America" was first used in an 1856 conference with the title "Initiative of the America. Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics", by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao. The term was used also by Napoleon III's French government in the 1860s as Amérique latine to consider French-speaking territories in the Americas, along with the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed, including the Spanish-speaking portions of the United States Today, areas of Canada and the United States where Spanish, Portuguese and French are predominant are typically not included in definitions of Latin America.
Asia is Earth's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the Eastern and Northern Hemispheres. It shares the continental landmass of Eurasia with the continent of Europe and the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa. Asia covers an area of 44,579,000 square kilometres (17,212,000 sq mi), about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Asia is notable for not only its overall large size and population, but also dense and large settlements, as well as vast barely populated regions. Its 4.5 billion people constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.
The IAO Library was established in 1908 and specializes in tropical and sub-tropical agriculture and economics, gathering over 131,000 volumes and 800 periodical magazines.
Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
The institute has a photographic archive and a documentation center, where historic information on agriculture in the tropics, and especially in the former Italian colonies, is stored.
The institute publishes an international scientific magazine: The Journal of Agriculture and Environment for International Development and several series of monographic studies.
The institute hosts a training center, and botanical garden with a collection of tropical and subtropical plants.[6] Its main building hosts collections of tropical agriculture products and insects.
Activities
Filecabinets of the Library
The Institute was involved in the several phases of the Italian overseas expansion. In the first twenty years of its existence, 1904 to 1924, it focused on the study of the natural resources and assets of Eritrea, Somalia and Libya. This orientation accrued the institute expertise in farming, technology, sociology and economics of the tropics. Such studies were intensified from 1924 to 1941, when the Institute assisted the expansion of Italian economic colonization of Africa. It participated in the elaboration of agricultural settlements plans, as well as in the training and technology transfer to Italian farmers and their families settling in the colonies. This great body of information, gathered under the direction agronomist Armando Maugini, resulted in the collection of a wide set of written and photographic documents and in the establishment of a collection of agricultural products, plants and other items, used in the training of technicians and dissemination of information.
The output of the institute studies and its technical proposals were implemented in the field. In order to host the growing staff and assets of the Institute, new and spacious offices were built in Florence, still home the institute today.
After the Second World War, and the repatriation of Italian colonists from Africa, the IAO collaborated with the Italian trust administration in Somalia, by supplying technical skills to the newly formed Somali federal government. It also assisted Italian farmers migrating to Latin America, who were benefited by the same services, such as training, technical assistance, investments planning, etc., created for the development of the Italian colonies. Such work was completed with the reshaping of the Institute endowments, under directors Armando Maugini, Ferdinando Bigi, and Arturo Marassi. Once the Italian agricultural migration flow faded, at the beginning of the 1970s, the Institute shifted its focus to the development co-operation policies of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, along the patterns established by Law n. 38 (1979) and Law n. 49 (1987). Such laws established the development co-operation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, collaborating with other scientific and technical institutions, in Italy and abroad. Since 1974, Prof. Nicola Matarrese, following the plenipotentiary Minister Ernesto Mario Bolasco, gives a decisive contribution in shaping the future development of the activity of the Institute in the framework of laws already in processing and then issued as indicated above. Matarrese leaves the direction of the IAO in 1977 to devote himself to full-time teaching of Agricultural Hydraulics at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Bari.[7]
In the 1970s, director Vincenzo Faenza strengthened the IAO in the agro-economic field. From 1983 to 1993, director Aureliano Brandolini enhanced IAO assets and human resources in the field of laboratory research, and broadened the collaboration with international and developing country research centers, in order to establish local knowledge and skills, and to fine tuning sustainable technologies on the spot. Since 2000, director Alice Perlini renewed the institute's strategy, by focusing on co-operation with civil society organizations, support to the decentralized co-operation processes, and training of Italian and foreign technicians. The continuous adaptation of the IAO to new situations and activity enhancement allowed the expansion of the collaboration network and presence of the Institute in forums where agricultural development and natural resources conservation topics are debated. At the same time, the digital classification of the institute's documentation was undertaken and internet tools, enabling a wider dissemination of the rich information heritage of the IAO, were established. The institute organizes scientific conferences and work groups, study meetings, other cultural events, and experience exchanges with other institutions in Europe and overseas.
I.E.K or IEK, is the Greek abbreviated name of Institute of Vocational Training in Greece.
The University of Florence is an Italian public research university located in Florence, Italy. It comprises 12 schools and has about 60,000 students enrolled.
The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) or National Research Council, is the largest research council in Italy. As a public organisation, its remit is to support scientific and technological research. Its headquarters are in Rome.
The Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies is a special-statute public university located in Pisa, Italy, operating in the field of applied sciences.
The Instituto Agronômico de Campinas is a research and development institution affiliated to the Agência Paulista de Tecnologia dos Agronegócios, of the Secretary of Agriculture of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, with headquarters in the city of Campinas. It is the oldest institution of its kind in Latin America, having been founded by Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1887 as the Imperial Agronomical Station of Campinas. In 1892 it was transferred to the state government.
The Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil, National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, (LNEC) is a public institution of scientific and technological research and development in Portugal. It is one of the largest civil engineering laboratories in the world.
The Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, until 2017 Istituto Superiore Internazionale di Scienze Criminali (ISISC) is a not-for-profit organisation located in Syracuse, Italy, that was established in 1972. The organisation specializes in the design and implementation of human rights, rule of law, justice and capacity building projects throughout the world. The organisation pays particular attention to such issues that arise from situations in Arab and Muslim countries.
The Giardino Botanico Tropicale dell'Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare is a botanical garden specializing in tropical plants. It is located at via Antonio Cocchi 4, Florence, Tuscany, Italy, and open without charge on Thursday mornings and by appointment.
The Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO) in Rome was established in 1995, as the result of the merging of Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO) with the Istituto Italo-Africano (IIA). It closed in 2012. Its museum collection is now overseen by the Polo Museale del Lazio.
The Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) is an Italian research centre dedicated to climate and climate related research, including climate variability, its causes and consequences, carried out through numerical models ranging from Global Earth System to Regional models within the Euro-Mediterranean area.
Aureliano Brandolini was an Italian agronomist and development cooperation scholar.
Luigi Fenaroli was an Italian botanist and agronomist.
Secondary education in Italy lasts eight years and is divided in two stages: scuola secondaria di primo grado, also known as the scuola media, corresponding to the ISCED 2011 Level 2, middle school and scuola secondaria di secondo grado, which corresponds to the ISCED 2011 Level 3, high school. The middle school lasts three years from the age of 11 to age 14, and the upper secondary from 14 to 19.
Istituto tecnico economico is a type of secondary school in Italy which is designed to give students the skills to progress to any higher educational institution.
Istituto tecnico per attività sociali has been a type of secondary school in Italy.
The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center is an international institute for agricultural development and biological conservation in Central America and the Caribbean, combining science, education and innovation. CATIE is the first graduate school in Agricultural Sciences in Latin America.
A Ministry of the Republic of Italy is an administrative organ of the Republic of Italy, which participates in Italian public administration and is characterised by one or more specific competencies, with an organised structure, often varying over time.
References
↑ AA. VV. L'Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare la sua storia, Florence, 2007
↑ AA.VV. Armando Maugini nel centenario della nascita, 1989
↑ Storia di una vita. Note biografiche di e su Armando Maugini. Bollettino della Società geografica italiana. (Edited by Elena Maugini and Luigi Fabbri), 1998: 195
↑ The Institute is run along the dispositions of the Law n.1612 of October 26, 1962 (), the Law n.49 of February 26, 1987, and the Decree (DPR) n. 177 of April 12, 1988.
↑ Piante Tropicali in Firenze, L. Frangioni, P. Luzzi, L. Giugnolini, 1991.
↑ N. Matarrese, "Missione IAO: non far spegnere la candela (Dai diari 1974-1977)" Bari, Edizione digitale, 2010 (testo in pdf)
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