Trade: Parmesan tariffs grate cheese shoppers
Americans snap up cheese ahead of tariffs
MILAN — Americans who appreciate the tang of aged Italian Parmesan cheese as an aperitif or atop their favorite pasta dish are stocking up ahead of next week’s tariff hike and as dairy producers in the two countries square off.
The Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti said Friday 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 the United States by 220% since the higher tariffs were announced a week ago.
The new tariffs — up from $2.15 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) to about $6 per kilogram — take effect Friday. Parmesan cheese is on a long list of EU products that will be hit by retaliatory tariffs approved by the World Trade Organization for illegal EU subsidies to aviation giant Airbus.
As a result, Coldiretti says, American customers will pay over $45 per kilogram, instead of $40 — which is expected to hurt sales in the U.S., the secondlargest 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 told the Associated Press
this week.
The consortium produces 3.7 million Parmesan wheels a year, each weighing an average of 88 pounds and aged from 18 months to over 30 months.
Parmigiano Reggiano is produced in a 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 U.S. National Milk Producers Federation has welcomed the tariffs on the Italian cheese, saying U.S. producers have been improperly blocked from selling their “common name” Parmesan in Europe, contributing to a $1.6 billion dairy trade deficit with the EU.
The milk producers’ lobby
“Europe has understood that this is a commercial attack.”
Nicola Bertinelli, president, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese consortium
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 “highquality Americanmade 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 copycat products.
“Hands off our names, enough identity theft,” Bellanova said last week. “U.S. 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.”