How does the importation in the US of counterfeit food products affect the Italian export industry?
This is quite a big issue in the Unites States. Just to give you an idea of how much the counterfeit food products affect the Italian export industry, I will mention two figures. In 2008 the export of authentic Italian food and wine totaled in value $3.5 billion. The fake Italian products in the United States reached a value of $4.5 billion. So the value of the fake products is actually greater than that of the authentic goods. This is a very big issue for the Italian Trade Commission whose main task is to promote authentic Italian products. What we mainly do is organize a lot of educational addresses to consumers in order for them to know what they are getting if they buy the fake products instead of authentic products. Therefore, we do a lot of tasting, pairing together the authentic products with the imitations. We do it for cheese and many other products. There is a lot of activity addressed to American consumers in order to combat this kind of problem as much as possible. What are
