What excellent news, risottos are becoming cheaper

There are always those who will complain about delicious food becoming cheaper of course:

Half a century on, the Italian rice industry is suffering badly from foreign competition.

While Italian farmers sell a tonne of home-grown risotto rice for 322 euros, producers in south-east Asia grow it for less than 200 euros a tonne.

Rice producers in the Po and Ticino valleys will organise a week of protests and strikes against the cheap imports, starting on Monday.

“In the first six months of this year, rice coming from Cambodia has been subject to at least one fine every week because of the presence of unauthorised pesticides or the absence of the proper food safety certificates,” said Roberto Moncalvo, the president of Coldiretti, a national farmers’ organisation.

The absence of the proper certificates is, of course, in this modern world, a heinous sin. And that presence of pesticides. Hmm, perhaps that's something to worry about?

Gianmaria Melotti, a rice producer from near Verona, said rice arriving from countries like Cambodia and Burma was devoid of the weevils and grubs that afflicted Italy’s output.

“What are they putting in their rice fields, that they are able to eliminate all these insects? Saving Italian rice means also safeguarding people’s health,” he said.

That's an interesting one to think about really, isn't it? Safeguarding peoples' health these days means ensuring that their rice is not vegetarian.

The answer here is obvious: as Bastiat told us we should always be looking at any and every economic question from he point of view of consumption, the consumer. And here the answer is blindingly obvious. Simply label the two, the imports with may contain pesticides and the Italian with does contain weevils. Let the customer make the choice.