Foreign Food “Invades” Europe

While tens of thousands of farmers from all over Europe are storming the buildings of European institutions in Brussels, Italy is denouncing the de facto invasion of foreign food, which brings to its knees high-quality Italian national production based on tradition and strict food safety controls. According to a report by Italian farming association Coldiretti, Italy’s agri-food imports reached a record 65 billion euros in 2023.

In the vast majority of cases, these are low quality products, often originating from countries that do not follow the same food and environmental safety regulations as Italy or the European Union. Significant quantities of Canadian cereals have recently been found dried using glyphosate, a substance banned in European countries.

“We demand that, with regard to imports, there be a clear halt to the importation of products from outside the EU that do not meet our own standards, guaranteeing the principle of reciprocity of rules, because we can no longer tolerate this unfair competition that jeopardizes the health of citizens and the survival of agricultural businesses,” Ettore Prandini, president of the Coldiretti, who is leading a protest of several thousand Italian farmers in the Belgian capital, told reporters in Brussels.

Farmers’ actions across Europe are taking increasingly extreme forms. In Poland, farmers broke open the sealed doors of a wagon with Ukrainian corn, which resulted in more than 160 tons of grain spilling out onto the ground.

According to Coldiretti that analyzed data from the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), “this is a real attack on Italy’s agri-food heritage, facilitated by crazy European policies that are causing a decline in national agricultural production, pushing Italy and other countries towards food shortages.” Italy, forced to follow the European Commission’s recommendations, is currently able to meet its domestic needs for soft wheat by 36%, corn by 53%, beef by 51%, and durum wheat for pasta by 56%.

The avalanche of agri-food imports has significantly reduced the prices of Italian products. But what makes a big difference, the Coldiretti experts write, are the “facilitated trade agreements” that import into Italy the products, often grown with pesticides banned in the European Union, which “create unfair competition with Italian products, reduce the prices paid to producers, and pose a threat to consumer health.”

For example, Asian rice grown with tricyclazole, a potent pesticide banned in the European Union since 2016, finds its way to Italy thanks to zero duties. The same is true for Canadian lentils dried with glyphosate, which account for about 70% of Italian imports of the crop.

Finally, Italian experts denounced the agreement of Mercosur, the common market of South America, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, as a potential “threat,” given the severe South American countries’ non-compliance with the provisions on the sustainability of agri-food production, in terms of strong environmental and food safety risks.