In the next ten years, at least 12 additional countries will join the present 15 EU member countries, whereas others are already pressing to become part of what is announced to be the most important regional economic area in the world. During those same years, the other regional areas will be consolidated, like the one of North America, Mercosur or the community of the Pacific and countries like China will be fully part of the world trade context. China alone represents one fifth of the world population. At the same time, Agenda 2000, together with the changes of the other world trade organizations and community agricultural policies, will produce important effects on the relationships between the EU agriculture and the market.

Equally, in the same period, the first international negotiation conducted within the WTO is expected to be concluded and will start producing its effects.

In the prospects outlined by these events, a trend towards a further enlargement of the agri-food market towards final globalization is quite evident.

The presumably rapid accomplishment of these events will determine notable effects on the production, economic and territorial systems involved with concrete risks of states of unbalance due to:

• the changes in the competition conditions between basin-based and world firms;

• the effects on the economic structure and the economic consequences of each single reality;

• the social (i.e. regulations on labour) and territorial-environmental (i.e. sanitary rules, gmo) that can result.

These are the themes on which the possibility of guiding the world agri-food system towards "positive" globalization will be based. It is in this sense that a discriminating role will be played by the capacity of arriving - through a serious programming approach and concerted management at the national and international level - at constituting a consistent framework between:

• market needs and unbalances on one hand;

• and needs and unbalances between intervention policies on the other.

The possibility of managing globalization as a source of development at the world level in general and the European and the Italian one in particular, will depend on the capacity of constructing a consistent parallel path between the market and the rules it is subjected to.