How Stephen Harper and an Italian love of terroir drove Alberta farmers into a trade war via torontostar
s second-largest producer of durum wheat, the grain that is used in semolina to make pasta and couscous. But is Canadian wheat as impeccable as we like to believe? Or is its cultivationThats what some leading personalities in agribusiness in Italy claim. Are they right? The journalist Marie-Claude Lortie, former columnist at La Presse, now the editor-in-chief of Le Droit, investigated these questions thanks to an award from the Michener Foundation.
“Of course we can see the difference,” said Miriam Carpinelli, who works in exports at Di Martino, while I downed a microscopic espresso, yet another sign I was in the south of Italy. We were debating the origin of wheat in Italian pastas; Canadian wheat, which may not be as good as the Italian varieties; and Italian lobbies who want to oblige pasta makers to put the origin of their semolina on the labels. She smiled to me gently.
In fact, he summarizes, if Italians use Canadian wheat, it’s because the pasta trade forces them to. It’s because the industrialization of production has created a demand for the primary resource that goes beyond the ability of its natural habitats to produce enough. “Canadian wheat makes life simpler for industrial pasta makers,” Di Martino said. “That’s the reality.
“We demonstrate every day that it’s possible to do this kind of farming without glyphosate. This is how organic farmers work,” added Marla Carlson, executive director at SaskOrganics, an association of organic farmers in Saskatchewan, one of the provinces where Canadian durum is grown. She thinks the controversy with Italy has been useful because it has helped raise awareness about glyphosate. And now there is real effort to help farmers work with techniques “that don’t hurt them in the market.” But the circumstances that led to the adoption of these agricultural shortcuts are still in place, she said.
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