Abstract

In the last decade the need to protect the weaker party within the food chain has emerged in the European legal systems, due to the crisis of the agricultural market and the parallel default of the EU incentives in favour of agricultural producers. More recently the EU adopted directive n. 2019/633 on unfair trading practices in business-to-business relationships in the agricultural and food supply chain, which has to be implemented by the 1st of May 2021. Within this general framework, the paper is focused on the effectiveness of the civil remedies afforded to weaker parties. It takes into consideration the Italian regulation in the light of both the French experience and the implementation of the EU directive. In particular, the analysis describes and confirms the difficulties encountered by both the French and Italian legal systems in determining when a commercial practice becomes unfair whenever the regulation falls outside the scope of the antirust regulation and in lack of a clear criteria.