The Trump administration’s greatest atrocity
By 
Impeach. Remove. The Hague:
Your favorite Italian-origin fusilli and macaroni are poised to disappear from U.S. supermarket shelves.
Italy’s biggest pasta exporters say import and antidumping duties totaling 107% on their pasta brands will make doing business in America too costly and are preparing to pull out of U.S. stores as soon as January. The combined tariffs are among the steepest faced by any product targeted by the Trump administration.
“It’s an incredibly important market for us,” said Giuseppe Ferro, La Molisana’s chief executive, whose family-run pasta factory sits on the edge of the southern Italian town of Campobasso. “But no one has those kinds of margins,” he said, shaking his head as the sweet, nutty smell of freshly ground wheat berries permeated his factory.
The U.S. Commerce Department has announced a 92% antidumping duty on pasta made in Italy by La Molisana and 12 other companies, which import the bulk of pasta from Italy to the U.S. That is on top of the Trump administration’s 15% tariff on imports from the European Union.
The Commerce Department acted after a long-running probe into pricing practices for the product that goes into everything from spaghetti Bolognese to mac and cheese. The severity of the decision has stunned one of Italy’s most iconic industries and has escalated into a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Rome, which is determined to combat the tariff.
“It would be a real shame to have the market snatched from us for no real reason,” said Ferro. La Molisana and the other companies are asking the Commerce Department to revise its assessment in its final ruling.
For Ferro, the fight is personal. He bought La Molisana, which was bankrupt at the time, in 2011 and turned it around, making it one of Italy’s leading pastifici, or pasta factories, with annual revenue of around $400 million. Exports to the U.S. have been key to that success.
This is bringing back one unpleasant memory of the shortages created by the pandemic, an episode I unfondly recall as “is Barilla really that much worse than De Cecco”? (Yes, is the answer. Turns out Italians have a comparative advantage here.)
By the way, what is the “national security” justification for this particular unilateral tariff? Was Trump upset because he went to Naples and they wouldn’t serve him macaroni and gravy?