President Donald Trump's tariffs could take Italian pasta off the shelves in American supermarkets.
The country's biggest pasta exporters warned that import and antidumping duties totaling 107 percent on their products would be prohibitively expensive, and they're preparing to pull out of U.S. stores by the start of next year, reported the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s an incredibly important market for us,” said Giuseppe Ferro, chief executive of the La Molisana brand. “But no one has those kinds of margins."
The U.S. Commerce Department announced a 92-percent anti-dumping duty on La Molisana and 12 other companies on top of Trump's 15-percent tariff on imports from the European Union, setting off a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Rome.
“It would be a real shame to have the market snatched from us for no real reason,” Ferro said.
The Commerce Department has been investigating complaints for decades from U.S. producers who say importers flood the country with pasta priced below market prices to undercut American competitors, but the penalties were usually small, so Italian companies accepted the fines as part of the cost of doing business in the U.S.
“All pasta makers, big and small, know that to export pasta to the U.S. you have to pay a tariff,” said Enrica Massarelli, a Naples-based accountant who specializes in fighting antidumping cases for Italian pasta companies.
But pasta makers say this effort, combined with the tariffs, feels different.
“This isn’t about dumping — it’s an excuse to block imports,” said Cosimo Rummo, CEO of Rummo Pasta.
The Commerce Department said it was punishing 13 companies because they were “uncooperative” with a investigation into their pricing p, but the Italians said the agency had assigned new analysts who lacked understanding of Italian accounting practices.
“This is the first time in 30 years that we are encountering this kind of intransigence,” Massarelli said. “It is absolutely not true that we weren’t collaborative. Mistakes can happen, in good faith.”