EU warns Italy over cheese scare

The European Commission has demanded Italy take “urgent measures” in response to a contaminated mozzarella scare or risk a Europe-wide ban on the sale of the cheese.

A statement issued in Brussels accused the authorities of doing too little to ensure that no contaminated mozzarella goes on sale.

But Italian agriculture minister Paolo De Castro insisted in Rome that there was no health problem surrounding mozzarella – and tucked into some in front of the cameras to prove his point.

The mozzarella in question is produced in the Campania region of Italy, which includes the city of Naples, and is still in the grip of a prolonged and massive waste-management problem exacerbated by the dumping of illegal industrial toxic waste from the north.

The waste industry in the region is under Mafia control and the crisis is believed to have generated contamination now infiltrating the prized buffalo mozzarella sector.

Japan and South Korea have already banned the cheese and the Commission gave the Italian authorities a deadline of 5pm yesterday to supply full information about the extent of the problem.

Failure to do so, warned a spokeswoman, would trigger EU “safeguard measures” under which the Commission has power to order the removal of buffalo mozzarella from the shelves in EU shops, or to ban imports all together.

Information supplied to the Commission by Rome on Wednesday included reassurance that the dioxin problem had been contained within the Campania region and that a promise that no mozzarella cheese containing higher than the permissible levels of dioxins has been traded outside Italy.

But after last night’s deadline passed, the Commission made clear it had still not received the necessary information about how officials are coping with excessive dioxin levels said to have already hit as many as 80 buffalo farms and two dozen dairy farms.

The Commission said Italy had reported checking samples of buffalo milk and buffalo mozzarella at 130 production sites, but only found dioxins above maximum EU limits in 25.

The buffalo farms supplying the 25 establishments had been traced and their milk destroyed.

But the Commission statement went on: “However, the Commission believes that the measures put in place are not sufficient to ensure that no contaminated product enters the market because no recall of product potentially contaminated has been carried out and the surveillance programme on the farms of the Campania region is still too limited.

“Therefore, the Commission has requested the Italian competent authority to take further urgent measures.

“If it considers this further action as inadequate, the Commission will consider proposing safeguard measures for dairy products originating from the region of Campania.”

Tucking into a portion of mozzarella was Mr De Castro’s attempt to counter the potential backlash of the scare for a major part of the Italian food industry, which produces 33,000 tonnes of mozzarella a year from a quarter of a million buffalo. The vast bulk comes from Campania and about 16% of the total is exported.

Already domestic sales have fallen by about one third, with a consequent drop in mozzarella prices, while the Japanese ban has blocked off an export market which normally takes more than 300 tonnes of mozzarella a year.

The stunt was reminiscent of former Conservative agriculture minister John Gummer’s 1990 attempt to play down fears about BSE by eating a beefburger in front of photographers and encouraging his four-year-old daughter Cordelia to do the same.