Times

MONDAY AUGUST 27 2001 Italians fear approach of great pasta famine BY CARL MORTISHED AND ROBIN YOUNG BAD NEWS for those who look to a Mediterranean diet to keep them healthy: crop failures in Italy’s parched South have created a shortage of the three principal ingredients — olive oil, tomatoes and durum wheat for pasta.

In Soho yesterday staff at the continental provisions shop Camisa were wondering if word of the shortage had triggered a run on pasta in the past week. “Our sales of Italian pastas have certainly been very heavy,” a sales assistant said. “Perhaps word about the short harvest has got out.”

Coldiretti, Italy’s biggest farmers’ union, says that with the essential ingredients in short supply, Italian households may be sold inferior foreign substitutes.

Instead of al dente spaghetti with extra virgin oil, the organisation says, Italian families may face “the unpleasant surprise of a plate of steaming, soggy overcooked pasta, flavoured with non-European olive oil and unripe Chinese tomatoes”.

Lack of rain has hit wheat crops across southern Europe. Coldiretti says the drought has caused particular damage in Puglia and other farming areas of the South. Quoting a farm research institute, Coldiretti said that olive oil production was down 32 per cent, the wheat harvest by 13 per cent and the tomato crop by 7 per cent. “The possibility is growing that there will be attempts to imitate these products abroad, passed off as ‘made in Italy’,” the farm owners’ lobby said. Sceptics in Britain, mindful of a 1970s television spoof about Italy’s spaghetti harvest from trees, may be unimpressed by Coldiretti’s warning. They may be inclined to take the Italians’ cries of woe with a generous seasoning of salt, particularly as so far there has been no shortage of exports of pasta, canned tomatoes or olive oil from Italy to Britain. This season’s shortages could, however, fuel next year’s price increases.

Shortages should not, however, be impossible to overcome. Canada has traditionally exported large quantities of durum wheat to Italy. Olives, also, are no longer just a Mediterranean product. With trees being harvested in Australia, New Zealand, California and Texas, New World olive oil may follow in the wake of its popular wines.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 2001