Nowadays, more and more consumers show a growing interest in healthy food products that may help to maintain or improve human health, such as honey. Honey has always represented a fundamental component of traditional medicine in many world cultures. However, only thanks to several studies carried out in the last years, its use is considered as an alternative and complementary medicine, namely apitherapy. In this way, honey is recognized increasingly by consumers not only as a natural alternative to refined sugar but as healthy food, as shown by determining an increase of its consumption worldwide. This study aims to explore the consumers’ determinants of honey consumption, trying to understand whether, and how much, therapeutic properties of honey affect the Italian consumers’ choices. The findings of this study, although exploratory, provide information on which quality characteristics influence honey consumption in Italy, revealing that, among quality attributes, the therapeutic properties of honey play an important role in affecting consumers’ behavior, followed by income, variety and taste. This could have some implications for producers and marketers as this information could contribute to defining effective marketing strategies for communicating to consumers the quality attributes of honey and its therapeutic benefits.

Culinary tourism represents an emerging component of the tourism industry and encompasses all the traditional values associated with the new trends in tourism: respect for culture and tradition, authenticity and sustainability. Italy is known worldwide for the richness and variety of its gastronomy, and agri-tourism represents one of the most important places where culinary tourists can experience local food and beverages. By using a modified version of Kim and Eves’ motivational scale, the present study aims to investigate which motivational factors affect the frequency of culinary tourists to experience local food and beverages in agri-tourism destinations. The findings of the present study reveal that the social and environmental sustainability, among the other motivations, has shown to play a crucial role in influencing Italian tourists’ frequency to experience local food and beverage in agri-tourism destinations.

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Abstract:Sicily has a long tradition in citrus fruit cultivations that with vineyard and olive tree represent the main Mediterranean tree crops. In this paper we have evaluated the economic and financial sustainability of lemon production, both in organic farming and in conventional farming; the two systems differing just for inputs utilized in production process. Economic analysis has been carried out in a representative case study located in the Sicilian northwestern coast, considering an orchard economic life equal to 50 years. Results, which referred to one hectare area, showed both a higher economic and financial sustainability of organic farming respect to conventional farming. The higher profitability of organic farming was due to minor labor requirement and to greater market appreciation for organic products that granted a premium price respect to conventional prices. Moreover, greater profitability of organic farming and use of environmentally friendly inputs in production process make farms competitive and eco-friendly.

Abstract:The production of energy from renewable sources is a form of energy production that has less impact on the environment than the traditional one. For the farmer this new form of production represents an opportunity, especially for the economic benefits that can produce, both in terms of the incentives provided by the public operator and for higher revenues, deriving from the sale of energy back to the grid and/or the savings generated by self-consumed energy, that help to increase the farmer's income. In this paper, we analyzed a case study of a farm that has realized a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system on a greenhouse. In particular, firstly the farm profitability has been estimated and subsequently, in order to assess the efficiency of the energy policy adopted by the Second Conto Energia in Italy, the minimum incentive tariff at which the entrepreneur has an economic advantage to realize a PV system has been determined. Results show that PV system relegates to a marginal role the cultivation of agricultural products compared to energy production and that government PV remuneration policies far outweigh the minimum threshold that makes the investment advantageous.