Italian policy moves compactly against healt warnings on wine labels

Controversy has not subsided since the EU Commission gave the green light to Ireland’s new law on the labeling of alcoholic beverages, including of course wine, which includes mandatory cancer, pregnant women and liver disease claims. The EU Commission had until September 22 to submit its objections to the Dublin government, but it did not see fit to do so, despite firm opposition from Italy, France and Spain and six other EU states, which see the measure as a barrier to the internal market. Ireland will, thus, be able to adopt warnings such as “alcohol consumption causes liver disease” and “alcohol and deadly cancers are directly linked” on wine, beer and liquor labels.
The danger, in addition to aspects related to EU market dynamics, is that the Irish example could be followed by other countries. Thus opening, from a future perspective, not one but two critical fronts within the EU: on the one hand, the Health Directorate General could adopt a similar approach at the EU level; on the other hand, there is the still open debate on food labeling, which thus risks taking very specific tracks. Immediately came reactions from wine and agricultural associations.
For the president of Unione Italiana Vini (UIV), Lamberto Frescobaldi, “Brussels’ tacit approval of Dublin regarding health warnings on alcohol labels represents a dangerous flight forward by a member country. Today’s events”, Frescobaldi concludes, “mark a paradoxical and ungovernable scenario of a Babel of labels within the European Union that, unfortunately, do not solve the problem of alcoholism”. According to Micaela Pallini, president of Federvini, the Irish legislation is “unilateral, discriminatory and disproportionate, splits the European single market, a discriminatory mode because it does not distinguish between abuse and consumption and criminalizes products of our Mediterranean civilization”. Fivi, with president Lorenzo Cesconi, calls the Irish initiative and the EU green light a “useless and harmful crusade: Italian and European winemakers are allies of institutions, not enemies, in campaigns for education and responsible consumption. We are by definition, precisely because our wine is not simply an alcoholic beverage, but a cultural product light years away from the substances abused in the quest for drunkenness. But Ireland’s proposed labeling rules and the substantial European green light are a huge mistake. Not only are they a blatant impediment to the free movement of goods and bring additional costs on top of the other already burdensome administrative costs involved in selling abroad. But most worryingly, the warnings proposed by the Irish government do not take into account at all the difference between abuse and consumption, an element that is also present in the European Cancer Control Plan”. For Coldiretti, too, this is a dangerous precedent, which risks opening the door to an EU regulation that would jeopardize a supply chain that, in Italy, from field to table guarantees 1.3 million jobs and is the main vice of agrifood exports. “It is completely improper to equate the excessive consumption of spirits typical of the Nordic countries with the moderate and conscious consumption of quality and lower-alcohol products such as beer and wine, which in Italy has become the emblem of a lifestyle that is slow, attentive to the psycho-physical balance that helps one feel good about oneself, to be contrasted with the unregulated intake of alcohol”, comments Coldiretti President Ettore Prandini. Confagricoltura President Massimiliano Giansanti, on hearing the news of today’s non-opposition to the Irish draft regulation, said he was “particularly concerned about the prohibitionist drift that the European wine sector is facing. The Commission has not listened to the reservations that Italy, with several other member states, has expressed to oppose the measures introduced by the Irish regulation, creating a serious precedent and a potential obstacle to internal trade”. From the world of wine territories, the voice of Chianti, the largest red appellation in Italy, rises up, with the president of the Consortium, Giovanni Busi, emphasizing that “if the rule were to be adopted by other countries, it would be inestimably damaging. Wine is the most well-known and appreciated product of Italian agri-foodstuffs in the world, similar labels on bottles would cause very serious image damage to the country and economic damage to the entire sector, without, moreover, any scientific basis: that quality wine drunk in the right quantities is bad for you and causes cancers and diseases is not proven at all. Ireland is not one of the largest importers of wine, but the risk is that the European Community will make such an argument its own, taking an unreasonable and harmful path”. Supporting and reinforcing the position of the Italian wine supply chain, then come the words of the political world. At the forefront is the Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Francesco Lollobrigida, according to whom the decision to allow the label on wine to Ireland “is extremely serious: we believe that behind this choice once again the aim is not to guarantee health but to condition markets, and that the push in this direction comes from nations that do not produce wine and where spirits are abused. They want to equate wine with spirits, but wine, used in moderation, is healthy food”. Vice-Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, on the other hand, entrusted his own comment to a tweet: “absurd Ireland’s decision to introduce a label for all alcoholic beverages, including Italian wine. Despite the opposition of the European Parliament. Choice that ignores the difference between moderate consumption and alcohol abuse. I will ask the EU Commission to intervene in the WTO”, Tajani wrote.
From the Veneto region, Regional President Luca Zaia thunders, “The European Union’s authorization to Ireland to put the words “wine kills” on bottles is an absurd choice, which risks setting a very dangerous precedent especially for genuine, appellation-based productions, the result of centuries of wine culture like ours. It is necessary to strongly oppose the spread of this practice, which appears out of place, useless and dangerous. That of wine”, Zaia continued, “is one of the major items of production and export of the Veneto region, which, from an action such as this, risks suffering huge damages, in the order of billions of euros. A hypothesis that I do not even want to consider. It is an absurd choice”, concludes the president of Veneto, “because every food, none excluded, if consumed in excess, can become harmful and, in pure theory lead to death. It is therefore inexplicable why wine is and any other food is not. As far as we are concerned, it is and will be very tough opposition”. From the EU Parliament comes the comment of Paolo De Castro, a member of the Agriculture and Rural Development Commission, among Italy’s longest-serving parliamentarians and a point of reference in the Commission, who says he is surprised at “how the European Commission does not take the slightest consideration of the position approved by a very large majority by the EU Parliament, which, in its resolution on the fight against cancer last February, categorically ruled out the introduction of health labeling systems, such as those on cigarette packs”. For the MEP, “once again we are faced with an attempt by some Northern European countries to demonize sectors that represent a heritage of our wine-gastronomic culture and tradition, with paradoxical demands that moreover seriously jeopardize the functioning of the European single market, with our producers who would find themselves having to comply with different labeling standards from one EU country to another. Fortunately”, De Castro continues, “the green light is not final: now Ireland will also have to be cleared by the World Trade Organization, as this legislation is also a barrier at the international level. A process that is expected to take about 60 days. While the Commission seems to have chosen to condition the choices of European consumers”, the MEP concludes, “as Parliament we will instead work to inform them more and better, with more transparent alcoholic beverage labeling systems that provide information on moderate and responsible consumption. This work has already begun, with the revision of the Regulation on Geographical Indications, which should be the tool to equally protect all European quality products, starting with wine, from these attempts at criminalization”. Finally, the condemnation of the cooperative world, with the stance entrusted to the words of the wine coordinator of the Alleanza Cooperative Agroalimentari Luca Rigotti: “the choice of the Commission to send forward the Irish bill on health warnings leaves us truly baffled. With this action, Ireland has gone to undermine and question the principles of the single market, within the perimeter of which the wine sector is regulated and which should guarantee, through the Common Market Organization, a precisely “common” application of European principles and rules in all member states. This, in my opinion”, Rigotti continued, “is the first and final argument against the EU Commission’s decision to endorse the Irish bill, as, moreover, the Italian institutions, along with those of eight other member states, had already had the opportunity to express to the Commission in their own detailed opinions, sent in recent months. Ireland’s initiative represents a truly dangerous precedent for the EU single market”. No less serious”, concludes Cooperative’s wine coordinator, “is the content of the regulation that Ireland is going to implement: in essence, wine, an agricultural product with a millennia-old tradition, which has never been absent from the tables of Mediterranean countries, is characterized as a product harmful to health in the same way as tobacco, without any distinction in relation to quantities and methods of consumption. This is exactly the approach against which we had fought, as an organization and as a country, in the drafting of the European Plan to Combat Cancer, and which, instead, the Commission has arbitrarily allowed to prevail: an ideological and mystifying approach that makes no difference between abuse and conscious consumption”.