First, the Wall Street Journal warned that tariffs would prevent the working class from buying $64,000 SUVs. Then Axios warned about the impact on French wine. Now, even more horrifyingly, behold the impact on… Italian pasta.
Your favorite Italian-origin fusilli and macaroni are poised to disappear from U.S. supermarket shelves.
Italy’s biggest pasta exporters say import and antidumping duties totaling 107% on their pasta brands will make doing business in America too costly and are preparing to pull out of U.S. stores as soon as January. The combined tariffs are among the steepest faced by any product targeted by the Trump administration.
“It’s an incredibly important market for us,” said Giuseppe Ferro, La Molisana’s chief executive, whose family-run pasta factory sits on the edge of the southern Italian town of Campobasso. “But no one has those kinds of margins,” he said, shaking his head as the sweet, nutty smell of freshly ground wheat berries permeated his factory.
The U.S. Commerce Department has announced a 92% antidumping duty on pasta made in Italy by La Molisana and 12 other companies, which import the bulk of pasta from Italy to the U.S. That is on top of the Trump administration’s 15% tariff on imports from the European Union.
Personally, I just buy the store brand or Barilla pasta, which is an Italian company, but whose products are usually made in America, depending on which is cheaper because we’re still living in the Biden economy. La Molisana pasta appears to be on the pricier side. I’m sure there are pasta lovers who want the real thing, at any price, but apparently not any price.
And the media keeps running stories about the tragedy of pasta producers who are all homespun folks making pasta with their hands while children play in the background with Don Corleone reclining in his rocking chair and sipping lemonade. It takes a lot to make the media love businessman, but the “lot” here is hating Trump.
“It’s a real pity,” laments Antonio Rummo of Donald Trump’s latest target in his ever-evolving tariff war: Italian pasta. Rummo is the sixth-generation grandson of the founder of Pasta Rummo, who opened a wheat mill in Benevento in southern Italy in 1846, using the family’s three horses to lug grain from the surrounding Campania region and Puglia to produce fresh pasta.
And they still make it with three horses too.
What the media isn’t telling you (shocking, I know, the idea that the media might leave something out, next thing you know Tucker will bring on an insane celebrity, cut all the footage of him being insane and then insist that “they” are trying to make you believe he’s insane, shortly before said celebrity shows up in a ski mask, anyway back to Italian pasta) is that the Commerce Department accused those companies (and their three horses) of violations.
La Molisana is actually considered one of the biggest Italian exporters and Commerce accused it of providing misleading information.
You can see the official findings here. And you can even imagine the “sweet, nutty smell of freshly ground wheat berries permeating” the paper while you read it.
Contrary to the media freakout…
1. Imposing punitive duties on Italian imported pasta is not likely to impact the average American consumer
2. This is a temporary measure to force compliance
3. The Europeans do this to us too
… but between the $64,000 SUVs, the French wine and the imported Italian pasta, how is a Democrat ‘public servant’ supposed to survive?
