STEPHEN DAISLEY
AS Mussolini learned to his misfortune, Italians are not a people to be messed with. Thankfully, no-one was suspended upside-down from meat hooks this week, but it was getting ugly there for a while.
The country has risen up in moral indignation at the spiralling cost of pasta.
This week, the clarion call went out from Italy's leading consumer groups: Italians were to boycott their beloved national dish for 24 hours. Grocers stood idly by as customers left packets of farfalle, fusili, and rotini on the shelves.
In Rome, demonstrators took to the streets, waving banners and handing out free bags of pasta to assuage withdrawal symptoms. The consumer rights movement faced down the food industry in a shoot-out - stetsons tipped, hands on Colts, as tumbleweed bounced across the pasta aisles of supermarkets the country over. Anyone remarking on the similarity of this scene to a spaghetti western is, frankly, being glib. This was an uprising.
The consumers aimed to voice widespread discontent at the hike in food bills. Italians take their pasta seriously. According to www.pasta.go.it, a pasta fansite, more than three million tonnes of it is piled on Italian plates every year.
But the growing cost of wheat is being passed on to the consumer, and the pound of pasta that costs 50p just now could be pricier to the tune of 20% by year's end.
But it's not just on pasta that consumers are feeling the heat. In Britain, Premier Foods, manufacturer of the UK's top bread brands, has injected a little yeast into its prices, with the cost of a loaf rising by 5p. Escalating corn prices are jeopardising Mexico's love affair with the tortilla. Frustration among Gallic shoppers is being reported as the traditional 65p French baguette is set for a 7% rise.
Fingers are being pointed in all directions. The developing world is eating more meat and, therefore, needing more wheat to fatten farm animals (inconsiderate as ever, those starving third-world types).
Closer to home, producers of durum flour, the main ingredient in pasta, have seen Australia's crops suffering a drought at the same time as Europe's wheat fields drowned in excess rain. This only a year after devastating storms laid waste to Italy's crops of basil, meaning no pesto to put on the expensive pasta.
Yet, with no single clear-cut cause, it would seem the blame can't be dished out like little portions of minced beef inside ravioli parcels. Not so, says Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). The global intelligence gatherer is terming recent events "the biofuel backlash". Wheat-growers, especially in North America, have been tearing up their traditional crops to cash in on environmentally-friendly fuels, thus precipitating the current crisis in wheat supplies. The libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, has attacked US government programmes that hand out state subsidies to ethanol farmers as an indefensible warping of the market.
Some might think state intervention and a little less carbohydrate in our diet a fair exchange for saving the planet. After all, proponents of biofuels - such as ethanol, biodiesel and non-petrol fuel sources - claim they are a more eco- conscious resource than hydrocarbons. The American National Biodiesel Board insists these products are a friend of the birds and the trees. "Biodiesel helps preserve and protect natural resources," the NBB claims. "For every one unit of energy needed to produce biodiesel, 3.24 units of energy are gained."
Au contraire, pipes up Friends of the Earth. The environmental campaigner invokes cautious quotation marks when speaking about such "green" fuels. It warns that biofuels may be produced by "destroying rainforests and wetlands, not only threatening endangered habitats and species but also releasing far more carbon into the atmosphere than could ever hope to be saved by replacing fossil fuels".
Laugh as we might at Italians defying national stereotypes, this week's protest should remind us that decreasing supplies of food and the rising tide of global population is not really funny at all.
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