Wheat prices tumbled 10% in October, over the previous month, making any further hike in pasta and bread prices unjustified, the Coldiretti farmers' union said on Wednesday.
In fact, the union added, prices should come down for flour-based products.
Inflation in October rocketed to 2.1%, from 1,7% in September, in part due to a whopping 10.3% jump in prices for bread and a 6.4% hike for pasta, over October 2006.
According to Coldiretti, higher prices have resulted in a 5.6% decline in pasta sales and a 7.4% drop in bread sales since the start of the year.
Because of complaints from Coldiretti and consumer groups, Italy's antitrust authority and magistrates in Rome opened two separate probes into suspected price-fixing.
The probe by Italy's competition watchdog 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.
Pasta producers said in September that their prices would have to go up because of higher costs for raw materials.
Coldiretti countered this claim by pointing 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.
The consumer group Codacons presented investigating magistrates with a dossier which monitored official prices for top quality of durum wheat from 1993 to today.
The study showed that prices hit a low in May of 2005, whereas prices for finished pasta products were unchanged from 2004 through 2006.
Codacons also pointed out that the price of one kilo of spaghetti, which had been unchanged from 2004 to 2006, jumped 27% this year.
