Consumer groups in Milan, Italy held nationwide protests to draw attention to the burden placed on families by the rising cost of food—especially Italians' beloved staple, pasta.

The prices of basic commodities are being driven up by middlemen, while farmers and producers earnings remain flat, activists said at protests in Rome, Milan, and Palermo.

In the case of pasta, Italians will soon be paying up to 20 percent more for their daily serving of fettuccine, linguine, or spaghetti. Picking on Italians' staple to draw attention to their cause, consumer groups called the one-day pasta strike, not against eating it but against buying it.

"Prices increase by five times between production and consumption," said Toni De Amicis, a leader of Italian farm lobby Coldiretti, during the protest in Rome. "The right recipe is to reduce the gap between production and consumption."

The increase in pasta prices is being driven by rising wheat prices worldwide, economists and producers say. The demand for wheat is the result of several trends, chiefly an increasing demand for biofuels, which can be made from wheat, and improved diets in emerging countries where putting more meat on the table is raising the demand for feed for livestock, said Francesco Bertolini, an economist at Milan's Bocconi University. As a result, wheat stocks worldwide are being depleted to their lowest levels in decades and grain prices are soaring.