|
|
Italy Food and Drink Report Q2 2008Published by: Business Monitor International Published: Apr. 30, 2008 - 75 Pages Table of Contents
AbstractItaly has a track record of implementing extremely zealous labelling requirements for food and drinkproducts sold in the country, as discussed in BMI's newly-published Q208 Italy Food & Drink Report. In2008 this has continued with additional labelling requirements introduced for olive oil. Often theserequirements are presented as necessary to ensure food safety or to prevent fraud, however they often gobeyond what is legally allowed under European Union (EU) legislation and it could be suggested that therestrictions are simply a way of battering foreign competition and assisting local producers. Thisobsession with the safety of foreign produce makes it ironic that in March 2008 the producers of one ofItaly’s most famous food products - buffalo mozzarella - were hit by a significant safety scare when themilk 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 promptedthe EU to ask Italy for urgent safety assurances. Notably, this revelation came after a report in July 2007from the EU commission issued a damning verdict on Italy’s compliance with the Hazard Analysis andCritical Control Point (HACCP) requirements, which were devised to harmonise EU food safetyrequirements. The report highlighted that across all regions Italy’s Factories and plants in do not complywith regulations that govern the post-mortem examination of animals, safety checks on raw milk andgeneral operational practices. Italy’s lack of safety regulations are likely to come under much greaterscrutiny after the dioxin scare and the negative publicity surrounding buffalo mozzarella couldconceivably spill over into Italy’s other food categories.Italian regulations are far more zealously applied to products produced outside of Italy. In 2006, thesafety of two separate shipments of durum wheat from the USA and Canada was called into question in aregion where local durum producers are known to be unhappy about the importing of foreign agriculturalproducts. Following the avian flu scare in 2005 Laws were passed that required farm, slaughter houseand country to be tagged onto all poultry products - legislation which favoured Italian producers and thatwas judged to breach EU single market rules. Similar country of origin legislation was implemented fortomatoes in 2006 along with a more stringent definition of what could be called ‘passata’ (uncookedtomato pulp) to try to limit Chinese tomato imports after concerns were raised from Italian tomatogrowers and processors. Most recently, in 2008 new rules where implemented to force olive oil producersto mark labels with the origin of the olives - a rule which is likely to encourage discrimination againstolive oils produced outside of Italy and has again been judged to be illegal by the European Commission. Get Full Details About This Report >> |
|
|||
|
About MarketResearch.com
|
||||