Light flavour hadron production in the ALICE experiment at LHC

Unique among the LHC experiments, ALICE has excellent particle identification capabilities for the measurement of light-flavour hadrons. A large number of hadron species from pions to multi-strange baryons and light nuclei have been measured over a large transverse momentum region. The measurement of the production of these particles is a valuable tool to study the properties of the medium formed in heavy-ion collisions. In particular they give information on the collective phenomena of the fireball, on the parton energy loss in the hot QCD medium and on the hadronization mechanisms such as recombination and statistical hadronization. The measurements in pp and in p-nucleus collisions provide the necessary baseline for heavy-ion data and help to investigate the effects of the ordinary nuclear matter. In this paper some of the main ALICE results on identified light-flavour hadron production in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV and p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.02$ TeV will be presented.