Truck drivers in Italy protesting against new austerity laws and higher fuel prices have reportedly caused significant disruption to the country's road network, blocking major routes and causing delays to the distribution of fresh produce along the peninsula.
Of major concern is the potential impact on the Italy's fresh convenience sector, and in particular the cluster of companies supplying and distributing fresh-cut produce from the area around Bergamo near Milan, in the centre-north of the country.
Those companies, which include leading companies like La Linea Verde and Il Tricolore di Telgate, account for around half of all the fresh convenience produce lines sold on the Italian market.
According to reports quoted on the Italiafruit News website, motorway blockades are preventing timely deliveries of produce with short shelf-lives by the area's suppliers to retail and foodservice customers.
'Our products have a production date and a use-by date,' commented Giuseppina Pezzali ofIl Tricolore di Telgate, which specialises in fresh-cut vegetables.
'Not being able to deliver in the time expected is a serious problem for us. We have clients across the entire country and abroad and a stop in supply equates to losses of more than €120,000 per day.
'If we add to this the difficulty in receiving vegetables from our companies located in other regions to be processed, the situation really becomes unsustainable.'
As reported in the Financial Times, the impact of the protests has also been felt keenly by the agriculture sector in Sicily, southern Italy, where farmers have apparently been left with no option but to dump produce after a week of disruption.
Italy's interior minister, Anna Maria Cancellieri, told journalists the government would not tolerate the blocking of key roads.
La Repubblica noted that the blockades were scheduled to last for five days, preventing road transport flowing freely through parts of Lazio, Campagnia, Piedmont and Lombardy.
'We won't move until Friday and then, in the absence of serious responses from the government, we will evaluate what to do,' said a spokesperson for drivers stationed at a blockade around the A1 between Rome and Naples.
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