Italy's Inflation Hits 5.4% as Farmer Blockades Empty Pasta and Mozzarella Shelves

Italian inflation climbed to 5.4% in October, its highest level in more than three years, Istat reported Friday — outpacing the U.S. at 3.7% and China at 0.9%. The number landed the same morning farmers tipped two bins of manure in front of Turin's city hall and tens of thousands of people marched through more than 50 Italian cities during a general strike called by the grassroots union USB. The takeaway: Italy's cost-of-living crisis has moved from statistics to street level, and it's choking the country's food supply.

What did the blockades do to Italy's food supply?

The fight started in mid-October, when truckers and farmers began blocking roads, ports and fuel depots across southern Italy over fuel costs. Diesel now costs roughly a third more than before the Iran war, and a temporary diesel tax discount expired earlier this month, according to ABC News. "It's a peaceful protest and it's for the benefit of the people," Vincenzo Aleccia, president of a trucking group in the Sicilian port of Trapani, told BNN Bloomberg.

The blockades cut supply to two of Italy's best-known foods. Buffalo mozzarella must be made within 60 hours of milking — and with trucks stopped, milk couldn't reach dairies near Naples. Pier Maria Saccani, director of the consortium that oversees Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP, said about 1 million liters went unused in a single day.

"Yesterday, no mozzarella was produced," Saccani told the AP, putting the loss at €3 million in 24 hours. He added that producers' costs had already risen about 30% before the blockades, and that they had absorbed most of that increase themselves.

Pasta makers ran out of ingredients too. Rummo, based in Campania, suspended production, and La Molisana halted its plant in Campobasso. Puglia grows about a quarter of Italy's durum wheat and mills much of the country's semolina, per Il Sole 24 Ore. Supermarkets in Naples posted apologies on empty shelves; Sicily ran short of fresh pasta, cheese and meat.

Why did the south bear the brunt?

The regions that grow much of Italy's food were the ones that ran out of it. Retail group Federdistribuzione said fresh food rotted in warehouses in Campania, Puglia and Calabria. "We realized we were only hurting half of Italy, our half, the south," Giuseppe Richichi, president of a Sicilian truckers' association, told AFP.

Protests in Milan and Bologna drew the headlines while southern blockades went largely ignored. "It's become impossible to face the costs of fuel," Luigi Di Benedetto, who manages an agricultural business in Caltagirone, Sicily, told EUobserver.

The economics behind the anger stretch back decades. Istat data show consumer prices rose about 63% between 2000 and 2025, while food prices rose about 90%.

How has the government responded?

On Oct. 22, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government approved a €175.2 million aid package for truckers, farmers and fishermen — bringing total aid to €540 million in tax credits. The last southern pickets came down the next day, but Richichi said the government was only paying money it already owed.

Meloni's cabinet has taken a harder line than it did during the February 2024 protests, when farmers drove tractor convoys into Rome over EU green rules, cheap imports and high costs. Before Friday's marches, the Interior Ministry made preventive arrests, and transport workers dropped strike plans after Transport Minister Matteo Salvini threatened sanctions. In Turin, police briefly used a water cannon to push back protesters who approached the prefecture.

What happens next?

The pressure point is energy. Italian energy prices were up 31.4% from a year earlier, and gas and diesel costs have pushed some to extremes — people were spotted riding horses through the streets of Naples. With inflation now above 5% and a temporary diesel tax discount already expired, the €540 million in tax credits is a patch, not a fix. Unless fuel costs ease, the supply chains behind Italy's mozzarella and pasta — and the farmers and truckers who run them — stay one blockade away from another empty-shelf weekend.