KEY POINTS:
In the past month, Naples' long-running rubbish crisis, in which the streets of Italy's third-biggest city were submerged under millions of tonnes of uncollected rubbish, has mutated smoothly into the great mozzarella disaster.
Last week, Italian public health authorities raided buffalo dairies across Campania, the region of which
Naples is the capital, and quarantined 66 herds after higher-than-permitted levels of dioxins were found in milk from 29 of them.
Dioxins are organic compounds produced in diesel fumes, burning waste, primitive refuse incinerators, metal smelting, and so on, which cause cancers, birth defects and immune-system damage in animals.
Industrialisation has meant they are present in every human being but, ubiquitous though they have become, nobody wants dioxins on their dinner table. In a clear indication of alarm, Italy's careful and scrupulous consumers have in the past weeks dropped buffalo mozzarella like a hot potato. Sales are down 50 per cent across the country at a time when the international appetite for mozzarella di buffala has soared worldwide.
A week ago, the Independent newspaper devoted its front page to the crisis, and in the following days alarms rang around the world.
South Korea then Japan announced all supplies would be stopped at their borders pending stringent checks, and France said it would take similar steps. On Thursday, the European Commission said the Italian authorities had not yet done enough to combat the problem: there had been no recall of potentially contaminated products, and the surveillance programme on farms in Campania was inadequate.
"The commission has requested the Italian authority take further urgent measures," it said. If it did not, Campania faced a dairy products ban.
France's agricultural ministry announced yesterday it had ordered its own ban, which was the shock Italy needed. Within two hours it had ordered a recall of mozzarella produced by 25 suspect companies in Campania.
As a result, the EU withdrew the threat of a Europe-wide ban, and later in the day France lifted its own banning order.
These are torrid times for the normally placid, fragrant business of whipping up mozzarella.
Alfonso Cutillo, the proprietor of La Baronia mozzarella factory, is one of the elite of Campania's producers located dozens of miles from Naples in the countryside. He began 22 years ago in the mozzarella business with 50 litres of buffalo milk a day. Now, Cutillo has 35 employees and produces 100kg of cheese a day.
It sells in half a dozen posh delicatessens in Rome and, twice a week, planes whisk fresh La Baronia mozzarella to London, where it sells for £15.50 ($38.70) a kilo. Because of the furore, La Baronia's sales are in free fall, down 30 per cent overall and 50 per cent in the Rome market.
- INDEPENDENT