INAIL open to applications for innovative machinery
Considerable attention at the great Bologna exposition was focused on the opening of applications for financing the purchase of innovative agricultural machinery from the funds of € 45 million managed by INAIL. The step came in a conference held by INAIL, the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work, which also reported on accidents in agriculture over the past 60 years to underscore work on prevention
Applicants for INAIL financing for acquiring agricultural machinery with updated standards of safety have until 6:00 pm on April 28, 2017 to file their requests. The deadline was announced on the sidelines of a conference promoted by INAIL, named by the government to manage the funds allocated, entitled Professional Accidents and Illness in Agriculture: Evolution of INAIL Regulations, Trend of the Phenomena and Economic Performance held in the setting of EIMA International.
Of the € 45 million allocated, € 5 million is earmarked for young farmers and the remaining € 40 million will be distributed to general farming enterprises. INAIL said the sinking fund financing will be assigned in the chronological order of the applications received until it is exhausted. The financial assistance for the purchase of machinery will come to 40% of the total investment in general and up to 50% of the investment by young farmers to a maximum of € 60,000.
The purpose of the funding is to spur investments in new technologies not only to increase safety in this field of work to lower accidents and professional illness but also to raise the sustainability of farming enterprises.
In this connection, rapporteurs at the conference stressed the point that in Italy, agriculture accounts for the second largest number of accidents behind only those reported in construction and ahead of those in industry and the services sector. However, prevention has made great strides thanks in part to more evolved design and mechanical technologies to lower accidents in the sector from 256,000 in 1955 to 37,969 in 2015, and a decline in deaths from 1,210 in 1955 to 164 in 2015, 102 of which were reported to the institute. Speakers also pointed out that the trend continued over the past five years with a 19.4% drop in accidents in general and a 10.9% decrease in fatal accidents. The INAIL statistics also disclosed that 80% of the accidents in farming can be assigned to men at work mainly in the northeastern regions.
The EIMA International conference promoted by INAIL also dealt with the evolution of regulations on safety and on-the-job accidents in the runup to the 2017 centennial of the introduction of insurance for farm workers, analyses of the accidents and pathologies typical of this high-risk sector and the institute’s financial benefits allocated for farm workers who have been injured.
INAIL also organized two high profile meetings on the issue of safety in agriculture. One was a workshop given the name Safety in the Agricultural Supply Chain; INAIL Training Activities focused on the prevention of accidents in this field. The other was a seminar entitled The Revision of Agricultural Machinery: An Opportunity to Improve Safety in the Place of Work and on Public Roads which covered the issue of safety associated to obsolete farm machinery and options for revising tractors to bring them up to date with current standards.
Also to report in the setting of the Bologna trade fair was the great success with the public in the INAIL area in the EIMA Desk pavilion dedicated to the dissemination of information and a window set up by FederUnacoma, the Italian Agricultural Machinery Manufacturers Federation, and UNACMA, the Agricultural Machinery Dealers Association, where institute representatives dealt directly with visitors seeking information on the opening of applications for financing and other activities pursued by INAIL on work accidents.
