Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a staunch right-wing conservative, is as close an ally as President Donald Trump has in Europe. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. Commerce Department from threatening to hit Italian pasta with a punitive antidumping tariff.

If the case isn’t resolved in the coming weeks — a potentially challenging timeline given the government shutdown in the United States — 13 of Italy’s largest pasta exporters would face punishing duties of 91.74 percent on everything from short tubes of rigatoni to chunky threads of pappardelle. That’s on top of the 15 percent imposed by the Trump administration on goods exported from the European Union.

Together, they push the total tariff amount on the most emblematic Italian export to nearly 107 percent.

In the United States, such probes into alleged “dumping” — whether foreign companies selling their goods in the U.S. at a cheaper rate then at home — are routine. But outraged Italian companies and industry groups say they have never seen such stratospherically high duties applied across the board. They call the duties — prompted by a complaint by two U.S. manufacturers — a trade barrier aimed at shutting them out of the lucrative American market so that U.S. pasta makers can seize additional market share.

The new duties would hit roughly 50 percent of Italy’s $780 million pasta exports to the United States, including 90 percent of its more expensive premium pastas, said Luigi Scordamaglia, CEO of the Italian food industry group Filiera Italia.

Tariffs on pasta from Italy could soon soar to more than 100%