Alone in Italy, approximately 300,000 farms are located in the region’s most severely affected by the drought emergency that affects the majority of Europe, from central and south-western France to northern Spain to southern Germany, as well as significant portions of northern Greece and southern Bulgaria and the majority of Turkey. This is according to Coldiretti's analysis of the Copernicus program's map of Europe, which depicts alarms and warnings about low soil moisture in many southern regions of the continent, with consequences for the environment, agriculture, and civil uses. The situation is especially worrisome for food supplies due to the drought that has afflicted the major agricultural economies of the European Union, which were already in a precarious position due to high production costs caused by the conflict in Ukraine. In Italy, the area’s most likely to be besieged by thirst are in the center-north, with the most dramatic situation recorded in the Po Valley basin, where almost one-third of the Made in Italy agri-food is born and fifty percent of the breeding that gives rise to the well-known Italian food valley. From durum wheat for pasta to tomato sauce, from fruit to vegetables to corn to feed animals for the production of great cheeses such as Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano and the most prestigious cured meats such as Parma ham or Culatello di Zibello, the production of the staple foods of the Mediterranean diet depends on the availability of water. Not to mention rice, whose sowing projections foresee a reduction of 8,000 hectares and are the lowest in thirty years.