Italy Food and Drink Report Q2 2008

Italy has a track record of implementing extremely zealous labelling requirements for food and drink products sold in the country, as discussed in BMI's newly-published Q208 Italy Food & Drink Report. In 2008 this has continued with additional labelling requirements introduced for olive oil. Often these requirements are presented as necessary to ensure food safety or to prevent fraud, however they often go beyond what is legally allowed under European Union (EU) legislation and it could be suggested that the restrictions are simply a way of battering foreign competition and assisting local producers. This obsession with the safety of foreign produce makes it ironic that in March 2008 the producers of one of Italy's most famous food products - buffalo mozzarella - were hit by a significant safety scare when the milk from 66 buffalo herds was found to contain unsafe levels of the cancer-causing substance dioxin.

The discovery led to mozzarella imports being banned in Japan and South Korea imports and prompted the EU to ask Italy for urgent safety assurances. Notably, this revelation came after a report in July 2007 from the EU commission issued a damning verdict on Italy's compliance with the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) requirements, which were devised to harmonise EU food safety requirements. The report highlighted that across all regions Italy's Factories and plants in do not comply with regulations that govern the post-mortem examination of animals, safety checks on raw milk and general operational practices. Italy's lack of safety regulations are likely to come under much greater scrutiny after the dioxin scare and the negative publicity surrounding buffalo mozzarella could conceivably spill over into Italy's other food categories.

Italian regulations are far more zealously applied to products produced outside of Italy. In 2006, the safety of two separate shipments of durum wheat from the USA and Canada was called into question in a region where local durum producers are known to be unhappy about the importing of foreign agricultural products. Following the avian flu scare in 2005 Laws were passed that required farm, slaughter house and country to be tagged onto all poultry products - legislation which favoured Italian producers and that was judged to breach EU single market rules. Similar country of origin legislation was implemented for tomatoes in 2006 along with a more stringent definition of what could be called 'passata' (uncooked tomato pulp) to try to limit Chinese tomato imports after concerns were raised from Italian tomato growers and processors. Most recently, in 2008 new rules where implemented to force olive oil producers to mark labels with the origin of the olives - a rule which is likely to encourage discrimination against olive oils produced outside of Italy and has again been judged to be illegal by the European Commission.