Less accidents at work in the agricultural sector

The use of innovative agricultural machines, in Italy, is having a positive impact on workplace safety in agriculture. This emerges from an Inail (the Italian public organization which adiministrates the compulsory insurance against accidents at work) report which analyzes the trend of accident reports between 2016 and 2020. In the last five years the agricultural sector has recorded a steep decrease in workplace accidents (-26, 3%), which fell from 36,199 cases in 2016 to 26,696 in 2020. The contraction affected each of the five years surveyed by Inail, even if it was more evident in 2020 (only 25,400 cases against the over 30,000 registered in 2016, 2017 , 2018 and 2019) when the containment of infections from Covid-19 made it necessary to completely block or slow down some activities. When it comes to work related deaths, the final balance of the five-year period reports a 10,1% reduction.
Emilia Romagna is the Italian region displaying the highest number of workplace accidents (12.8%) in the five years period, followed by Veneto (8.7%), Lombardy (8.6%), Tuscany (8,5%), Puglia (7.9%) and Piedmont (6.8%). More than half of all the accidents reported in Italy are concentrated in these six regions, while the highest percentage of work-related deaths is recorded in Puglia (12.8%), followed by Emilia Romagna (12.0%), Piedmont (9.0%), Sicily (8.6%), Lombardy (7, 0%) and Tuscany (6.8%).