MADE IN ITALY: COLDIRETTI CLAIMS PASTA AND PIZZA PRODUCTS ARE AT RISK

The ‘Made in Italy’ diet, more commonly known as the Mediterranean diet, is seriously at risk with the exponential increase in the importation of foreign foods like tomato preserves (+101%), olive oil (30%), and grains (7.7%) for making pasta and pizza, the products that are the symbol of traditional Italian cooking.

This alarm was raised recently by Italian food and agriculture union Coldiretti, based on the data released by ISTAT for the first quarter of 2007, in order to emphasize that the increase in imports is aided by the fact that there are no obligations to indicate the origin of a product on labels and, thus, foreign food products can be sold as traditional Italian foods.

For olive oil, Coldiretti notes that Spain and Tunisia are the main suppliers to Italy, while tomatoes arrive, above all, from China. And, Coldiretti points out, if these trends are confirmed throughout 2007, over half of the olive oil sold as Italian oil in supermarkets will be pressed from foreign olives while a third of tomato concentrates on the national market will be of Chinese origin.
It is probable that, in restaurants and pizza parlors, an apparently Italian menu actually consists of ingredients from far off lands that cannot boast the same environmental and productive qualities of those produced in Italy.

In response to this attack on traditional national food products, Coldiretti asks for an intervention for more transparent measures in order to give consumers and restaurant owners the possibility to make conscientious acquisitions in regards to the origin of food products.

For the basic foods of the Mediterranean diet – continued Coldiretti – it is also necessary to complete the initiatives already taken at a European level, where norms for the mandatory printing of product origin on labels have been adopted for beef products following the Mad Cow Disease scare in 2002, and for fruit and vegetable products in order to indicate the variety, quality and origin of fresh produce in 2004. The origins of honey have been obligatory since 2004 as well. And, in Italy, thanks to organizing efforts by Coldiretti, the printing of origins of dairy and poultry products became mandatory in 2005.

The fact is that, according to a survey completed by ANCC-Coop Italia in which it was revealed that in 2007 almost one in three Italians want to buy more Italian products, it has become necessary to intervene in the transparency of information because half of national spending for food products goes to anonymous goods for which obligatory labeling is still not in effect. The risk being that these goods are sold on the market as false Made in Italy products, to the detriment of entrepreneurs and consumers who spend a good 125 billion euros per year.