These days in Brussels a decision on the preferential duty system on arrivals from South East Asia. Rice industries: the already processed product costs the same as the raw product in the EU
Facilitated (and cheap) imports, global surpluses, together with the devaluation of the dollar, reduced freight rates and the impact of the climate crisis on producers are putting a strain on the resilience of the Italian rice supply chain.
The latest alarm for a concomitance of factors ‘that are not manageable by the supply chain’ comes from Airi, the Association of Rice Industries, which for some years now, with the expiry of the European safeguard clause that Italy had painstakingly managed to activate in Brussels, has been facing the resumption of duty-free imports from large producers, which have come to cover over 60% of total European purchases.
Rice that is largely ready-packed and packaged, sold at prices that are unsustainable for continental producers: today, via Rotterdam, milled white rice arrives at 400 euro per tonne; competing European varieties cost at least twice as much, 800-1,000 euro. In Italy, 400 euros buys a tonne of paddy rice, an agricultural raw material that then has to be transported, stored, processed and packaged… Il Sole 24 ore
