Limiting agricultural land consumption to guarantee food security and sustainable development

For many years the need to protect the soil and its productive (primarily alimentary), environmental and landscape functions has been recognized at the international, European and State level. Nevertheless, fertile land is increasingly given over to non-agricultural uses, reflecting governments' current inability to develop viable means for limiting the most common causes of fertile agricultural land reduction: urbanization (overbuilding and infrastructure development) and the so-called suburban sprawl. The paper focuses on the assessment of a ,,new" threat represented by the installation of large photovoltaic systems on agricultural land, and on legislation recently adopted in France and Italy. in order to oppose the phenomenon, whilst at the sa me time seeking to reconcile the policy of promoting renewable energy sources (in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) with policies a imed at protecting food production, landscape and environmental interests.