Sardinia's shepherds stage hunger strike to highlight their dying way of life

Silvano Pistis will soon be hard at work. Lambing time at his farm on the island of Sant'Antioco, off the south-west corner of Sardinia, is a few weeks away. Then comes the busiest time of year as Mr Pistis, his two brothers and their parents buckle down to the task of getting the lambs weaned and fattened for Christmas. Farming is in their blood and no task is more traditional in Sardinia than raising sheep – but for the Pistis family, however, these days it is a dead loss.

"We can't go ahead," Mr Pistis says, flatly. "The big companies that buy our sheep's milk for cheese pay 70 cents per litre – the price hasn't gone up for 30 years. But the prices of everything else have soared. We used to receive a subsidy from the EU – ¿4,000 or ¿5,000 a year – but last year they stopped it. There is no way we can carry on. We are not making any money at all. The way things are going, we'll end up with no work, no farm, out on the street."

Today, Mr Pistis, a 27-year-old with a jutting chin and a grave expression on his ruddy face, is in Rome. For a week, he and other Sardinian farmers and fishermen staged a hunger strike in the municipal offices of a village in southern Sardinia, trying to get regional and national governments to notice their plight.

Now they have brought their struggle to the Italian capital because Mr Pistis's dire predictions are about to come true. He and his family could lose everything they own – their sheep, their farmhouse, the pens, the fodder, the barns, the lot. Everything is to be sold at auction to pay back at least a fraction of the ¿120,000 (£83,900) they owe banks.

The root of their problem is that in 1988 the Sardinian regional government gave them a cosy deal typical of those offered to Europe's farmers in the heyday of the Common Agricultural Policy – large loans at a low, fixed interest rate to modernise their farms. Four years later, the deal went spectacularly wrong when the EU declared it illegal and the low interest rates to be an unfair distortion of competition.

By this point, however, the loans had been spent and, once banks raised interest rates, farmers began slowly sinking in debt. Today, some 50,000 landowners owe banks ¿700m (£490m). Their only hope is to persuade central government to take emergency action to stop the seizures and fire sales from going ahead. But this hope has brought new fear into their lives.

Last week, a farm owned by one hunger-strikers was firebombed and Riccardo Piras, a leader of the group fighting to stop the sell-offs, received a letter containing a drawing of a coffin. "We will shoot you in the back and we'll blow up your farm with bombs," it promised.

It was a warning to drop the campaign to bring the farmers' problems to government attention. Sardinia's gorgeous coastline is one of the hottest properties for the Mediterranean tourism industry and, as farmers' woes have multiplied, the vultures of speculative finance have been gathering. Mr Pistis is in no doubt that if he and his family were to be forced off his farm, some hotelier would snap up the land at bargain price and build a resort on it.

The Sardinian crisis is one symptom of the larger malaise in Italian farming. Gianni Fabbris, a leader of Altra Agricoltura, a pressure group supporting the Sardinian families, said: "To cut agricultural spending, the EU wants to cut the number of farms which means, in particular, cutting those where there is the greatest concentration of workers. That means the farms of the Mediterranean – Italy in particular."

The policy presents a conundrum. Pastas, prosciuttos, cheeses, olive oils and other products made in Italy are huge sellers worldwide, yet production in Italy – with sliding subsidies and import markets open to the world – has become prohibitively expensive. Some of Italy's celebrated ham producers are rearing pigs in Romania at much lower costs, then bringing them to Italy for the last three months of their lives, so they can be accredited as Italian. The durum wheat used to make famous Italian pastas may be grown in Ukraine or other low-cost countries.

Meanwhile, Italy's farmers are going to the wall. Mr Fabbris predicts that by 2013, when most EU subsidies have been phased out, 40 per cent of the country's one million farms may have been forced out of business.