Category: Company Vision

Bergamot: Our quality brand

7.02.2019

SMAF Associates LTD operates in the Bergamot sector as a national and international “Supplier”. Our activity towards the Bergamot starts from a long experience in the agricultural products market, in the buying, selling, import-export, logistics, sea-to-sea and land transport, insurance and customs issues. We also sell the Calabrian BERGAMOT DERIVATIVES: essence, debris, puree and juice.

Our quality brand protects the ORIGINAL BERGAMOT OF CALABRIA, a citrus fruit whose worldwide cultivation is concentrated mostly in Italy (about 90%), in the province of Reggio Calabria.

The presence of liaison offices in Calabria ensures us a strategic position for the supply and distribution of this good. We are the privileged interlocutor for the World of Commercial Catering and Collective Food, the HORECA sector and all the business forms that need a high level of quality about Bergamot as well as a constant and customized quality standard.

Boxes, ready to be loaded on the pallet

From our photos in this post, you can clearly understand how our quality brand offers the best fruit, coming from the real bergamot cultivation as rooted on the Ionian coast of Reggio Calabria, in the area from Villa San Giovanni to Gioiosa Jonica, on an area of about 1500 hectares, with a cultivation that makes 20,000 tons of fruit with an average of 100,000 kg. of essential oil.

In this place, Bergamot is mainly cultivated in alluvial and clayey limestone fields, where a greater yield of essential oil is obtained. The best fields are those located in hilly areas not subject to frost and exposed to good sun-lighting. In fact, bergamot is very sensitive to thermal swings and can be damaged if the temperature drops below 3 ° C or rises too much; it also needs frequent irrigation.

CULTIVARS GUARANTEED BY OUR BRAND

Of the bergamot are known three cultivars (typologies):

Castagnaro: The fruit is glossy, medium-thick peel. The fruit harvest begins in November. The tree is good height and has large leaves with a lanceolate geometry.

Feminine: The fruit is spherical with a thin skin. The fruit harvest begins at the end of October and the tree grows quickly but with little height. It is a plant little long but premature and has medium growth leaves with a lanceolate geometry.

Fantastic: The fruit is globe shaped, the plant has good height, it is rustic and has larger leaves than other cultivars. Harvesting of fruits takes place in November-December.

TECHNICAL USE

Use in cosmetics: Bergamot has a delicate and persistent aroma, which is an excellent scent even by itself.

Nobody could imagine that our perfumes come from these boxes

Nevertheless, along with other citrus essential oils it contributes to fix the bouquet of perfumes by transmitting to cosmetics an indefinable sweetness and exquisite freshness.

It is well-known that essential bergamot oil, thanks to its freshness, is the basic ingredient not only of classic Cologne water but also of many other delicate perfumery products, compositions such as “Chypres” and “Fougères”, of modern basis of fantasy, cosmetics and soaps, etc.; to scent soaps it must be used with caution given its low stability with alkalis.

Other aromatic uses: Bergamot derived pectins can be used for jams or, conversely, for aromatizing tobacco pipes, candies, tea, etc..

In recent years, essential bergamot oil has been used with great success in suntans, thanks to the presence of photodynamic substances (furocumarine or psoralen) known for their ability to stimulate melanogenesis.

Medicinal or herbal use: Essential oil is a potent antiseptic, but unlike phenol, it is not smelly or caustic.

It is antiseptic to urinary, digestive and respiratory tracts.

The strenght of fruit

On a nutritional level, bergamot (or lemon) juice, with the weak acids contained in it (acetic, malic, citric, tartaric acids…), gives rise to the production of carbonates and carbonate alkaline (potassium and calcium above all), which in addition to promoting intestinal calcium absorption, contribute to maintaining the alkaline reserve.

NUTRACEUTICALS

Vitamines: For the vitamin C, Bl and B2, P and vitamin A and E content in juice and flavedo, bergamot can be considered a fruit with good vitamin content; therefore, it is useful in bone disorders due to altered calcium absorption, teething disorders, collagen pathologies, muscular weakness or even neuromuscular hyper-excitability, cardiac heretism, iron deficiency anaemia, hepatic congestion and various diseases with impaired vessel permeability.

The essential bergamot oil (which today is used at an average dose of 1-2 drops per day, away from meals, diluted in water or in a teaspoon of honey or in pearls) stimulates appetite and liver and pancreatic functions.

It is useful in cholecystitis, in tachycardia and arterial hypertension: it is locally useful in stomatitis, gingivitis and pharyngitis; it is an intestinal, disinfectant and astringent pesticide. It is balsamic in the respiratory tract. It acts in a tonic and antidepressant way on the psyche.

Essential oil can be used in the field of herbal medicine as an aroma therapy support, with neuro-sedative and antidepressant functions and as a adjunct to psoriasis and vitiligo therapies.

Southern Economy and Mediterranean Food Export

27

Wine is very life to man if

taken in moderation.

Does he really live who

lacks the wine which

was created for his joy?

28

Joy of heart, good cheer and

merriment are wine drunk

freely at the proper time.

[THE BIBLE, SIRACH 31]

L’ULIVO 

Laudato sia l’ulivo nel mattino!

Una ghirlanda semplice, una bianca

tunica, una preghiera armoniosa

a noi son festa.

Chiaro leggero è l’arbore nell’aria…

[“ALCIONE”, GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO]

WINE AND OLIVE OIL

Not a few historians have written of the looting, which immediately after 1860 the South and Calabria, in particular, suffered by the work of the post-unification Italian state, –  a looting led by the Savoy monarchy, and in the hands of a handful of adventurers from the north of Italy who used that corrupt state to increase his private wealth.

However, despite the systematic robbery against the South, pursued through taxation, initially Savoy and then Fascist, between 800 and 900, and through the industrial protectionism that has favored the factories of northern Italy since the end of the nineteenth century, the South has grown, in spite of everyone, and providentially.

Some economists from the University of Magna Graecia in Calabria argue that, nowadays, the South has grown almost 16 times in every sector relevant to the economy and public services. And this statistical estimate is sufficient both to condemn the sectarianism of the nostalgic of the great old Bourbon south (or neo-Bourbon), which have no reason to speak of an enormous pauperism of the south, both to push northern Italy and the current Italian state to invest more in the south.

In fact, the current poverty and unemployment gaps are “relative”, so it is important to intervene to alleviate the relative poverty (even urgently) and it is decisive and necessary to severely criticize the unworthy enrichment of a part of Italy at the expense of another without assigning it the burden of helping the south.

The proposal to stimulate the economy of the south, which we want to present shortly in this short post, is political and economic together and will be better explained in the next paragraph.
In the meantime, we simply present it as follows:

The remedy for the South, the investment that the State should implement is that necessary to increase the export of food and beverage from the south of Italy: WINE and OLIVE OIL (which goods are full of meaning, for every country and culture,  as the magnificent citations from Bible and the Poetry intend to recall). 

 

THE SPIRIT OF OUR PROPOSAL

The remedy of exporting food and beverage (wine and olive oil and all related products) is also a spiritual answer to the neo-fascist temptations of industrial capitalism of northern Italy. 

Our cultural references for this response are the capitalism with a human face of Pope Leone XIII and his encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, but also the self-sustainable economy of the well-known banker of the poors, Mohhamed Junus, and his theory of self-sustainable social business.
We will apply these two sources of economic thought to the economic policy of export incentives in Southern Italy.


We think that re-entering resources from abroad is the most peaceful alternative to the absenteeism’s policy of the great Italian political parties, a policy absent from the South.
The South must be able to support itself, even self-support, without relying on an absent and disinterested state towards their own poors.

Another of our references will be the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has also recently claimed that culture, even and above all the humanistic and religious culture, is at the same time a true education to fiscal and economic democracy, a response to the one-dimensional thought of the selfish profit and fascist/capitalistic robbery carried out to the detriment of people’s dignity.

We believe that a possible implementation of social capitalism that the Church has spoken of may come from both the cultural awakening of the self-sustainable dignity of the poors and, particularly in the Southern Italy, the improvement of social, cultural and scientific relations through the commercial exchange of exports.

 

THE SOCIAL CAPITALISM OF WINE AND OLIVE OIL

The reason can be found in Rerum novarum, the famous encyclical of the Pope, Leone XIII, who  also recognized that the poor have a special status, according to the modern Catholic principle of the “preferential option for the poor” and the notion that God is on the side of the poor were expressed in this document. Who is rich is a sort of temporary bursar of the providence, whose action shall be devoted to the poor.

The South is the poor brother of the rich North, who shall either renounce his own riches, extracted by deceit and theft, to be perfect and holy (like the rich young man in the Gospel parable) or “make friends”, among the brothers, “by means of his unjust wealth” (in order to be welcomed in the “eternal tents” of the eternal friendship of the brothers and of the Lord).

However, that the looted South has risen 16 times by the unification of Italy, as economists say, while maintaining the sign of a severe economic gap, shows that the economy is more complex than current science knows economic. Providence operates overcoming and frustrating the bad intentions of the richs, through porous and fuzzy social networks that made leak, even to the South, the wealth stolen through decades and decades of economic, social, cultural and family exchanges, completely peaceful between North and South.
There is enough truth in this observation to silence the pretensions of both Northern Leagueists (indifferent to the South gaps) and Southern Leagueists (secessionist, like Pino Aprile and similar), both communist thinking (always critical of a mythical oppression of the south) or the radical chic (indolent and totally refractory to even the problem of world poverty) and the fake Berlusconism (that rebukes the poors of inertia and inactivism).

The South could even self-sustain itself, as the banker of the poors Mohamment Junus says of developing countries, intertwining peaceful export relations with the rest of the world without asking for help from the “rich young man” of the North or the Italian absenteist state.
Providence would continue to operate peacefully, decade after decade, undisturbed, and the richs could sleep on their laurels, while the social, economic and religious culture of wine and olive oil, with its export flows puts the poor in contact with the widespread providence on the whole earth and again fills the hungry and the humble with goods.