The price of wheat out of control and the opportunity lost by Sardinia

In the last two months , the price of wheat has gone out of control , making the "bread road" impervious to a few billion people in the world and weighing on the budget of Italian families. For Sardinia, which was once the granary of Rome, there are many regrets for the missed opportunities given that today 560 thousand quintals of cereals arrive by sea.

For two months the price of wheat has increased by seventy percent with easy-to-calculate consequences: statistics tell us that every Italian consumes twenty-three kilos of pasta a year and, counting a minimum increase of sixty cents per pack of pasta, we arrive to an increase of eighteen euros per capita per year. It means that, keeping us low, a family of four will have to spend at least seventy-two euros more just for a plate of pasta that is still the cheapest food.

This happens because mills and pasta factories are energy-intensive industries and have to face the out-of-control increase in energy and raw materials. Costs that, I play, are made to fall on distribution with the inevitable increase in the price on the shelves. The war has forced many operators to review their sources of supply, bearing in mind that Ukraine and Russia produce about thirty percent of world grain production and that the Black Sea route is the most important. But the problem comes from afar: the masters of bread in the world are four giants, four sisters on the model of the companies that control oil and which can also act on the futures markets by betting on the price at a fixed date.

Sardinia, we said, has lost an opportunity. Taking the data of the imports necessary to satisfy the internal demand of pasta factories and ovens (560 thousand quintals in 2021), Coldiretti made a simulation to understand how much area should be cultivated to cover the needs of the island : "Calculating an average of thirty quintals per hectare ”, explains Luca Saba, Coldiretti's regional director,“ the quintals exported are equivalent to 180,000 hectares of wheat and cereal crops that could be grown in Sardinia. Up to 2003 the cultivated areas amounted to about one hundred thousand hectares; with the change in EU policy, the premium that gave the possibility of growing wheat with European incentives was removed and so production dropped to twenty thousand hectares a year ”.

Alfredo Franchini