How the rise in wheat prices may increase the price of pasta at the start of the school year – franceinfo

Pasta makers are bracing for a shortage of durum wheat. A situation due to the various climatic hazards of recent weeks in Europe and Canada which have caused a drop in harvests. They are asking the government for a plan to secure their wheat supplies.

Pasta makers estimate that for a euro packet of pasta, the price will already go up by 10 cents. And it may not be over yet. Because to make pasta, you need wheat, and more precisely a particular variety, durum wheat, also used to make semolina. With the harvests this summer disrupted by the weather, the price of durum has soared. Its price has reached a record for the past six years. On the French market, it starts at 335 euros per tonne, a 24% increase just since the beginning of July. Never seen.

According to specialized organizations, such as Agreste, this upward trend is likely to continue. Some manufacturers even fear having to go up to 500 euros per tonne and in this case, the price of a package of pasta to one euro would increase by 20 cents.

For pasta manufacturers, the culprit of this increase is obvious: it is climate change which threatens the production of pasta. Indeed, the weather this summer, bad, weighs very heavy in France but also on a global scale. Little is known, but the largest producer of durum wheat is Canada. It supplies almost a third of the world market and the dome of heat that has affected the country has seriously affected the crops with an exceptional drought: they are down 32% from the average of the last five years.

In Europe, the opposite happened: too much rain. They have been abundant this summer. The problem is not so much the quantity, although it is slightly less than needed, but the quality. Due to the rain, the weight of the grains is too often insufficient and as a result, the wheat becomes unsuitable for the production of pasta and semolina. Let us not hope to turn to Russia: there too, the harvests are bad and the world stocks of durum wheat will not make up for the losses.