Pasta manufacturers plead that more durum wheat must be grown in France

If manufacturers are worried, it is because the cultivated areas, currently around 240,000 hectares, "have been halved in the space of fifteen years", while pasta consumption continues to grow (+8% since 2019), explains to AFP Albert Mathieu, president of the union of industrial pasta and semolina manufacturers (Sifpaf) and also CEO of Panzani. "The best way to secure French durum wheat production is to increase the cultivated areas", he says. Manufacturers are trying to convince farmers, who "will make decisions in the coming weeks on their sowing" for the 2025 harvest, to choose durum wheat. In 2023, France produced nearly 1.3 million tonnes of this cereal exclusively intended for human consumption, from pasta shells to couscous. This year, "while the cultivated areas are identical, and therefore small, it is estimated that the harvested volume will be a little over a million tonnes", indicates Albert Mathieu. The durum wheat harvest, like that of its cousin soft wheat, was ...