Italy insists its mozzarella is dioxin-free

ROME – With television cameras capturing the moment, Italy’s agriculture minister Thursday ceremoniously devoured pieces of white, chewy mozzarella cheese and proclaimed there was no reason for alarm.

But alarm is what is engulfing Italy’s $500 million mozzarella industry after the cheese that is a quintessential national product came under unsettling scrutiny. The best mozzarella is produced from the milk of buffalo cows that graze near Naples in southern Italy, a region besotted with illegal, mafia-controlled toxic trash that Italian governments have failed to clean up for more than a decade.

Tests by Italian officials recently showed higher than permitted levels of dioxin, a cancer-causing poison, in cheese coming from among 83 of the nearly 2,000 dairy farms in the Campania region around Naples that produce the top-line buffalo mozzarella.

Japan and South Korea immediately suspended imports of Italian mozzarella. The European Union leadership demanded explanations and scolded Italian officials for failing to provide adequate information.

The European Commission, the EU’s regulatory body, threatened a Europe-wide trade ban on Italian mozzarella if better precautions and more forthright accounting were not put in place.

A ban would deal a heavy blow to the industry.

“The Commission has requested the competent Italian authority to take further urgent measures,” the European Commission said in a statement.

Italian authorities struggled to reassure the public that the tainted cheese does not represent a widespread health risk.

“The cases are few, and they have been isolated,” said agriculture minister Paolo de Castro.

“We would have to eat seven kilos of mozzarella in a day” to constitute a potential health problem, said industry official Carlo Cannella, who accompanied de Castro in the cheese-eating news conference.

Authorities shut down production at the 83 affected farms. Tests are being conducted to trace the origin of the dioxin.

Italy produces 33,000 tons of buffalo mozzarella a year, about 16 percent of which is exported to the U.S., as well as Asia, Australia and other parts of Europe.

De Castro and other officials insisted that no contaminated cheese was exported. Meanwhile, domestic sales of buffalo mozzarella have fallen by 30 percent since the scare started two months ago, with a reported loss of $50 million in revenue.