Is there pesticide in your spaghetti? Canada’s golden wheat reputation hangs on the outcome of a pasta war

Next to the European Union, Canada is the world‘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 cultivation tainted by the controversial use of the pesticide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup?

That’s 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.

This is the first of a series of three articles. Translated from the French by Paul Wells.

MONTE SAN PIETRANGELI, Italy – Our story begins in the middle of a wheat field, in the heart of Italy, in the comune, or municipality, of Monte San Pietrangeli, where there’s a pasta factory owned by Massimo Mancini, a son and grandson of wheat farmers.

It’s a matter of pride for Mancini and his colleagues that they grow the durum wheat they use to make spaghetti, macaroni and other noodles bound for sale in Italy and abroad, including in Canada. So his factory is actually in the middle of a field.

Mancini was explaining to me why he is so intent on working with his own semolina, when he said something in passing about Canadian wheat that caught me by surprise. Over there, he said, referring to our immense country, they sometimes use pesticides in the fields right before harvest, which risks leaving residue in the grains. Do we really want to work with that kind of primary material?

The claim and the question caught me by surprise. I’d always believed Canadian one of the best in the world, that we were culinary peacekeepers, always ready to feed the planet thanks to the endless, golden fields of our Prairies.

I knew our oil industry was the butt of accusations by environmentalists, and that our treatment of First Nations was nothing to be proud of when it came to talk about Canada abroad. But our wheat? Really? This I had to investigate.

“What? Our wheat? But it’s something to be proud of!” said the Alberta senator Paula Simons, vice-chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, when I asked her about this. “I also think our durum wheat is the best in the world,” she added, though she had to admit she had never heard of the Canadian practices the Italians were complaining about. Even though she lived in the heart of Alberta.

“Is it dangerous?” she asked.

Good question.

The practice at the heart of these controversies is the use, in pre-harvest, by Canadian farmers of a herbicide called glyphosate. Powerful, versatile and sprayed around the world, it’s the active ingredient in Roundup, which was put on the market by the U.S. company Monsanto, acquired by the German multinational Bayer in 2018.

Glyphosate has been criticized for years by critics who doubted its harmlessness and have connected it to some cancers and to Parkinson’s disease. Its use in Canada is regulated but entirely legal — and in Italy too, though the restrictions there are more stringent. Glyphosate is a weed killer. So it is spread in fields before the seeds are sown, to “clean” the earth. But in Canada it’s also spread in fields where wheat has already grown, shortly before harvest. This is done to kill weeds at the end of the season, so they don’t come back in the spring, and it is permitted by law.

It’s an open secret that some Canadian growers use the product for a more controversial secondary effect, which is to dry nearly ripe wheat, which then dies because of the glyphosate spraying. This use of glyphosate allows for an earlier harvest.

“In Italy, we usually sow wheat in the autumn and harvest in June, when it’s hot and dry,” explained Emilio Ferrari, president of ITALMOPA, the Industrial Millers Association of Italy. I interviewed him in Parma, at the Barilla pasta factory, where he works. “The wheat dries naturally in our fields. In Canada, if you sow in the spring and you harvest when it’s colder and more humid, you may have poor conditions that could ruin your harvest. It’s less and less used by farmers, but that’s where glyphosate is used.”

Because of this practice, which is officially forbidden in Canada and denounced by some lobbies in Italy since 2017 — notably the Grano Salus association, the huge Italian agriculture union Coldiretti, and the consumer-advocacy magazine Il Salvagente; the Italian senator Saverio de Bonis has also been a vocal critic — a campaign has been underway for five years to block Canadian wheat from the country outright.

“Yes, there’s pressure to close our market to Canadian wheat,” confirmed Enrico Cinotti, deputy editor of Il Salvagente. “For 10 years we’ve been regularly testing pasta brands to inform consumers, politicians and pasta manufacturers. The pressure is also strong from Coldiretti, but often in these fights, there’s a risk that it’s more about protectionism than a defence of consumers’ interests.”

The last tests published by Il Salvagente showed glyphosate in the spaghetti of seven major Italian brands.

Under pressure from these organizations, in 2018, Barilla stopped buying foreign durum wheat for the domestic Italian pasta market. Barilla is the largest pasta maker in Italy and in the world, with 4 billion euros in annual sales, or $5.4 billion Canadian, according to Forbes.

But today, in 2022, there is no general agreement in Italy on the question of foreign wheat. Hated in 2018, Canadian wheat is returning to Italian pasta mills. That’s because a significant part of the Italian pasta market is reliant on Canadian durum. Notwithstanding the arguments of buy-local advocates and those who worry about glyphosate in food, Italy needs foreign wheat, whether from Canada or other outside sources, for 30 to 40 percent of its annual production.

“Grade 1 durum wheat from western Canada is one of the best in the world,” said Riccardo Felicetti, president of the Unione Italiana Food, the association that represents Italian pasta makers, in an interview near Venise, where he is responsible for distribution of Felicetti organic pasta made in the Dolomites and sold worldwide, including in Canada.

“Besides,” Felicetti said, “we need it.”

Italy’s 139 pasta makers produce 3.4 million tonnes of pasta a year, worth 4.3 billion euros (about $5.9 billion Canadian). There’s not enough Italian wheat to feed that market.

“In fact, Canadian wheat is good. In quantity and quality,” said Emilio Ferrari of ITALMOP and Barilla. But he didn’t want to talk to me about Barilla’s purchasing practices. Neither did the multinational’s public-relations staff.

“You’re doing fantastic work with durum,” said Giuseppe De Martino, who comes from three generations of pasta makers and owns two factories in the city of Gragnano, just outside Naples. “There’s no problem with Canadian wheat,” he said.

But he doesn’t use it.

The extent to which Canadian wheat is used in Italy for pasta today has become an impenetrable industrial secret — as if its poor reputation made it unusable, but the realities of the market and of industrial production made it indispensable.

Barilla, the huge manufacturer, gives no details. Felicetti’s company takes only Canadian kamut, a niche grain — and it has discovered glyphosate in Canadian kamut, but far below allowable limits, and only because containers had been poorly cleaned, he said. Di Martino uses only Italian wheat. And not just any Italian wheat: he uses only grain from a hilly area that straddles Puglia, Campania and Molise, because durum wheat likes sunny regions with good drainage, he explained. “My grandfather taught me how to taste wheat,” he said. In his high-end world, pasta is as much a product for connoisseurs as wine, and wheat is scrutinized like grapes.

In fact, after spending months looking into this question on both sides of the Atlantic, I can say that in Italy, nobody says they use controversial Canadian wheat — but everyone knows someone who uses it. And in Canada, no farmer says they use glyphosate to dry wheat, but everyone knows somebody who has done it.

What we also know is that according to the World Bank’s global commercial statistics, 839,000 tonnes of Canadian durum wheat went to Italy in 2021; nearly 1.6 million tonnes in 2020; 881,000 tonnes in 2019. To be sure, exports in 2018 were as low as 293,000 tonnes, no doubt due to the coordinated anti-Canadian wheat campaign in Italy. But sales rebounded.

According to Riccardo Felicetti, Canadian durum was the victim of a disinformation campaign led by the main grain growers’ union. “Instead of supplying products of a higher quality, they set about attacking the quality of others’ products,” said the spokesman for the Italian pasta makers.

With consumers demanding products made from Italian wheat, their price has started climbing, he said. Except that’s no way to be competitive on world markets. And Italy is, unsurprisingly, the world’s largest pasta exporter. In short, according to Felicetti, Italian producers need foreign wheat, and Canadian wheat in particular, to prosper.

I returned a few months ago to Italy’s eastern Le Marche region for another talk with Massimo Mancini about glyphosate and wheat. I told him I now understood the reluctance with regards to Canadian durum better.

But even he warned me against too-simple conclusions. “You also need to talk about phosphine,” he explained, referring to a gas used as a preserving agent. “It’s used in transatlantic transport.”

And we could also talk about many of the farming techniques of different growers, even in Italy, he added. And about the storage of wheat while it awaits processing. “All that, it’s very complicated,” the businessman added. “Limiting discussion to whether wheat is Italian or not is very superficial.”

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