The 'barmy Parma drama' is over - and Asda loses its fight to cut up the ham

After six-year legal battle, the European Court says prosciutto cannot be sliced up by a supermarket, packaged and sold as Parma ham

The pigs are fed on whey left over from the making of parmesan cheese, the hams are cured for up to 10 months in stores built on the rolling Langhirano hills south of Parma. And as anyone knows who has watched an Italian droghiere (grocer) at work, slicing the resulting prosciutto (ham) is as skilled and exacting a process as producing it.

And now, after a judgement yesterday by the European Court of Justice, anyone buying pre-packaged Parma ham at a British supermarket can be sure that what they take home was not only raised and cured on the hills of Langhirano, but sliced and packed in the Parma region as well.

The verdict came at the end of a six-year legal battle, in which the Prosciutto Association of Parma sought injunctions against Asda - owned by the US retail giant WalMart - to stop them slicing and packaging the hams in-house and selling the result as Parma ham. The decision in Luxembourg reverses two earlier judgements in British courts.

The ruling does not affect parma ham bought at a delicatessen counter as long as the ham is sliced in view of the customer. But the judges insisted that if you slice ham for the supermarket shelves, you have to do it in the region of production, or it will just not taste the same. And if the taste is affected, so is the "authenticity" and the reputation of the ham.

To food philistines in the north of the continent, the notion of eminent judges, first British then European, scratching their heads for a full six years over how a particular type of Italian ham should be sliced and packed is the very stuff of Euro-madness.

"Barmy" was how Asda spokeswoman Rachel Fellows described the six-year wrangle.

"Our argument is that we were allowed to slice it in front of customers on the delicatessen counter, and that's Parma ham, but we weren't allowed to take the same ham, slice it and pack it elsewhere, and call it Parma," she said.

The ham producers of Parma, of course, saw it differently. For them yesterday was a big day. "This is an important day for the 200 producers of Parma ham," said Stefano Fanti, managing director of the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma, the association representing the 200 producers.

"Control over the whole process, including slicing and packaging, guarantees quality and authenticity," he added.

In the rest of Italy, too, the ruling, which also applies to Grana Padano, a cheese which can now only be sliced or grated for pre-packaging in the Po Valley, will be instantly understood and widely welcomed: it begins a process of bringing the marketing of "artisan" foods across Europe into line with the way it is done in Italy, where the traditional products of different regions are accorded respect that verges on the religious.

That's why Italians get so angry when foreigners pass off their imitations as the real thing. The immense popularity of Italian food and cuisine worldwide has led to an explosion of cheap, and often nasty, imitations of Italian products by firms abroad, many of them impudently bearing the Italian tricolor.

At a meeting in Rome this week to protest against "food piracy", the organisers displayed a horror show of pseudo-Italian items: "Roman pecorino sheep cheese" of unknown provenance; "Sauce alla Romana", a hazy attempt on the authentic Roman amatriciana; and a bag of some white substance labelled as "Italian mozzarelli [sic] rolle".

So the apparently obscure legal victory over the supermarkets is part of a deadly serious battle over the future of agriculture and the place of Europe's best-known delicacies in the world's trading system.

The Luxembourg-based court's decision is one more step down the road of protecting the best products of European gastronomy. The Parma producers' legal battle was fought using the rules of a system of certification for Europe's most famous foods introduced in 1996, combined with rigorous checks to maintain quality. Today around 600 foods and 4,000 wines and spirits have been registered and enjoy the protection of European law. They may be luxuries, but their annual sales yield up to €40bn (£28.5bn) a year.

For the producers the advantages of a registration system that bans cheap imitators are obvious. Consumers are showing a growing interest too. Shocked by a host of food safety scares, from mad cow disease to dioxin in chicken, Europe's shoppers have sought reassurance in the guarantees provided by a carefully policed system.

According to Mr Fanti, the figures speak for themselves. "Last year we exported more than six million packets of pre-sliced Parma Ham to the UK, each one supervised by independent inspectors and marked with the Consorzio's brand, the Parma Ducal Crown," he said. "The quality and consistency of the approved product is recognised by the British consumer with a 65per cent increase in sales in three years."

For the EU, which bankrolls its farmers to the tune of €40bn every year, the new policy makes sense. Brussels is seeking to shift its vast Common Agricultural Policy away from its relentless emphasis on production towards the production of better quality food.

Gregor Kreuzhuber, spokesman for the European Commissioner for agriculture, Franz Fischler, said the objective is simple: "Less quantity, more quality. No more beef mountains or wine lakes, but additional money for those farmers who want to produce more quality." All commercial logic points this way, he argues. "Quality produce is an increasingly important niche market. Consumers ... want to know where it is coming from, they want to see traditional food produced in a high quality way. What we want to do in our farm reforms is to spend more money on boosting quality produce, helping farmers to live up to higher standards."

But those redirected subsidies will be wasted if those who don't observe the rules can market their produce in the same way. Hence the need for a strictly policed system.

Europeans, even those in the north, may be converted: appreciation for the quality of the traditional foods of southern Europe has been rising steadily for decades now. The bigger battle looms across the Atlantic, where yet another great divide threatens to open up - this one between the Foodies and the Rest.

The EU is campaigning for the protection of its delicacies to be guaranteed worldwide. As part of world free-trade negotiations it is pressing for a formal registration system for wines and spirits and a system to protect them from cheaper competitors (at present they are forced to take legal action).

Moreover it wants around 40 to 60 other European products, likely to include Parma ham and Roquefort cheese, to be given total protection by all members of the World Trade Organisation. Some developing countries also back the idea, including India, which wants to protect Basmati rice and Darjeeling tea.

But the real challenge will come from across the Atlantic.