EIMA International opens in Bologna on Tuesday 10 November, for the forty-seventh time. The figures released by FederUnacoma, the Italian federation of agricultural machinery manufacturers, do not describe a fair in decline: 1,800 exhibiting companies, 650 of them foreign from 45 countries; more than 830 foreign operators selected by the Italian Trade Agency (ICE) from 120 countries, up from 450 operators from 85 countries in 2024; at least 14,000 business meetings scheduled over the first three days in a dedicated pavilion. In 2024 the fair drew 350,000 visitors, more than 63,000 of them from abroad, from 150 countries.
For readers outside the sector: the "business meetings" are half-hour appointments between a manufacturer and a foreign buyer, fixed on an agenda before the fair opens. The "selected operators" are importers, dealers and large farms that ICE, Italy's public export agency, invites at the expense of the Italian system. This is the mechanism that turns a national fair into a world market for five days.
All of this matters, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. An Italian machinery maker needs EIMA the way it needs its annual accounts: it is where the company measures itself against competitors, shows what is new and meets in one week people it would otherwise spend a year looking for. The question is not whether to go. The question is what a single participation can deliver, and what it never will.
The full article looks at what a fair can and cannot give, at why Brazil is the clearest example of the gap, and at two places in South America, a town in Rio Grande do Sul and the Paraguayan Chaco, where European technology transformed a territory because it went into the field and stayed there.