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October 17, 2019

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Shoppers snap up cheese before tariff hike

By Colleen Barry | 00:00 UTC+8 October 17, 2019 | Print Edition

US consumers who appreciate the tang of aged Italian Parmesan cheese as an aperitif or atop their favorite pasta dish are stocking up ahead of tariff hike and as dairy producers in the two countries square off.

The Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti said recently that sales of both Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano, aged cheeses with a distinctive granular quality that are defined by their territory of origin, have skyrocketed in price in the United States by 220 percent since the higher tariffs were announced one week ago.

The new tariffs — up from US$2.15 per kilogram to around US$6 a kilogram — take effect tomorrow.

Parmesan cheese is on a long list of EU products targeted by the Trump administration for retaliatory tariffs approved by the World Trade Organization for illegal EU subsidies to aviation giant Airbus.

Coldiretti says American consumers as a result will pay over US$45 a kilogram, instead of US$40 — which is expected to hurt sales in the US, the second-largest export market after France.

Nicola Bertinelli, president of the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese consortium, says the tariffs threaten the economic health of 330 small dairy producers in the area around Parma and the 50,000 people who work in the production supply chain.

“I believe that ... Europe has understood that this is a commercial attack,” Bertinelli said.

The consortium produces 3.7 million Parmesan wheels a year, each weighing an average of 40 kilograms and aged from more than 18 months to over 30 months. Parmigiano Reggiano is produced in a defined territory from the Apennine mountains to the Po River from the milk of 250,000 cows raised in the same territory to earn its “protected designation origin,” a label given to specialty foods from a specific geographic region.

The US National Milk Producers Federation has welcomed the tariffs on the Italian cheese, saying US producers have been improperly blocked from selling their “common name” Parmesan in Europe, contributing to a US$1.6 billion dairy trade deficit with the EU.

The milk producers’ lobby said the use of “geographic indication,” like Parmigiano Reggiano, has been “abused” to limit competition of cheese imports from the United States into the EU. It argues that Europe should allow the “high-quality American-made foods” using common names to compete next to the products certified with “protected origin” names.

But Italy’s agriculture minister, Teresa Bellanova, vowed to protect Italian businesses against imports of what she sees as copy-cat products.

“Hands off our names, enough identity theft,” Bellanova said. “US producers want to upend reality and use common names to sell their products in Europe. If their project is to sell fake Parmesan or mozzarella in Europe, we have to make clear it will never happen.”

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