The Swiss are proud of their cheese, and most of the cheese they eat are local varieties such as Gruyère, Emmental and other hard cheeses made from milk. The Swiss also eat a lot of cheese: more than 50 pounds per person per year, compared with 40 pounds per person in the United States.
“Cheese is part of our identity,” said Daniel Koller, a director at Swissmilk, Switzerland’s dairy association. That’s why one of Koller’s colleagues, the president of the association, created a storm this month when he told a Swiss newspaper that Switzerland was on track to import more cheese than it exports this year, which he called “absurd economically, socially and ecologically.”
The Swiss cheese trade balance has been shrinking for decades, and especially since the market was liberalized in 2007, which allowed the country to trade with the European Union without tariffs or quotas in either direction. Switzerland now exports about 40% of the cheese it produces, per industry estimates.
In each of the first five months of this year, Switzerland imported more cheese by weight than it sold abroad, according to customs data. That’s because the Swiss have developed a taste for foreign cheeses, with local varieties accounting for 64% of consumption last year, down from 77% in 2007, according to Swissmilk.
The number of dairy farmers in Switzerland has fallen more than half in the past 25 years, Koller said. On top of that, farming operations in Switzerland are small: The average size of a herd is about 27 cows, Koller said, and dairy farms with more than 100 cows are rare.
Although an influx of foreign cheese might challenge notions of Swiss national identity, economists say the nation need not panic. Swiss producers have become more specialized, and the cheeses they export tend to be the higher-value varieties, such as Gruyère. Imports are cheaper — and softer — and largely come from France. (What’s called “Swiss cheese” in the United States is an…
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