The food chain concept is an increasingly common theoretical instrument for food and rural development policy and many countries adopt the so-called “new rural paradigm”, so to integrate different sectoral policies. This paper aims at adopting the food chain paradigm in order to analyse the regional agro-food system and to sustain the design and delivery of consistent inter-sectoral policies. It adopts the netchain concept (Lazzarini et al, 2001) and the theory of governance patterns in global value chains (Gereffi et al, 2005). Results show this innovative approach contributes to better understand and stimulate economic performance of the whole agro-food network.