A leading Italian consumer rights group is lending a hand to magistrates investigating recent price hikes for pasta products which are suspected of being unjustified.
Codacons said on Friday that it has presented investigating magistrates with a dossier on price trends to contradict the arguments used by producers to justify the price hikes.
"In our dossier we highlighted the unusual difference between the price of wheat and the cost of finished pasta products. Using official data we dismantled the explanations used to justify the price hikes, which we consider pure speculation," said Codacons President Carlo Renzi.
"We also traced for the magistrates the variations in price from the field to the table in order to demonstrate how much the cost of the raw material weighed on the product's final cost," he added.
"We did all this in the hope that the probe will not run into a dead end and that those responsible for speculation will be identified and punished," Renzi explained.
"In our dossier, we followed the official prices for the best quality of durum wheat from 1993 to today. And in doing so discovered that the prices hit a low in May of 2005, whereas prices for finished pasta products were unchanged from 2004 through 2006. Now we would like to know how that happened," the Codacons president said.
In their dossier, Codacons showed how the price of one kilo of spaghetti, which had been unchanged from 2004 to 2006, leapt 27% this year.
Magistrates opened their pasta probe on Monday in response to press reports on the price increases. At present no specific charges or persons are being investigated.
ANTI-TRUST AUTHORITY ALSO LOOKING AT PASTA PRICES.
Last week, Italy's anti-trust authority announced that it had opened an investigation to determine whether the recent hike in pasta prices was the result of price-fixing by two associations representing pasta makers.
This probe will seek to determine whether the Industrial Union of Italian Pasta Makers (Unipi) and the national union of small and medium-sized food companies UnionAlimentare created a cartel to fix pasta prices.
The probe, which is set to conclude by November 30, 2008, came as a result of a complaint filed by the consumers' rights group Federconsumatori.
In the complaint, the consumer group cited a meeting between around 50 Unipi members, who represent 85% of Italy's pasta production, during which a decision was allegedly made to increase pasta prices.
During a preliminary investigation, the anti-trust authority found that similar indications had been made by UnionAlimentare.
Pasta producers said in September that their prices would have to go up because of higher costs for raw materials.
At the time, Unipi justified the hikes by stating that the price of raw materials had shot up in recent months.
The price increase announcement led consumer rights' associations to organize a one-day pasta strike, urging Italians to forego all food shopping.
Those unable to follow such a strict boycott were asked to shun pasta in particular, the symbol of the protest.
Farmers gave their backing to the protest and the Coldiretti farmers' union pointed out that the increases in the prices of bread and pasta had "nothing to do with wheat prices, which have remained the same since 1985".
"But since then, the gap between the price of wheat and the price of a loaf has increased by 750%," Coldiretti claimed.
According to Coldiretti, higher prices had resulted in a 5.6% decline in pasta sales and a 6.1% drop in bread sales since the start of the year.
