The Italian Platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Anna Maria Mancaleoni
The Unfair Commercial Practices in the Agro-Food Chain and the Civil Protection of the Weaker Party in the Light of EU Directive 2019/633 and of the French Experience
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.