The Swiss are proud of their cheese, and most of the cheese they eat are local varieties such as Gruyère, Emmentaler and other hard cheeses made from the milk of happy cows that are famous all over the world. The Swiss also eat a lot of cheese: over 50 pounds per person per year, compared to about 40 pounds per person in the United States.
“Cheese is part of our identity,” says Daniel Koller, director of Swissmilk, the Swiss dairy organization. That is why one of the colleagues of Mr. Koller, the association’s president, caused a storm this month when he told a Swiss newspaper that Switzerland was on track to import more cheese this year than it exports, which he called “economically, socially and environmentally absurd”.
In fact, Swiss cheese’s 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 percent of the cheese it produces, according to industry estimates.
But in each of the first five months of this year, Switzerland imported more cheese than it sold abroad, according to customs data. In part, that’s because the Swiss have developed a taste for foreign cheeses, with local varieties accounting for 64 percent of consumption last year, up from 77 percent in 2007, according to Swissmilk.
The number of dairy farmers in Switzerland has fallen in recent decades, with a decline of more than half in the past 25 years, Mr Koller said. In addition, farming activities in Switzerland are small: the average size of a herd is about 27 cows, said Mr. Koller, and dairy farms with more than 100 cows are rare.
While an influx of foreign cheese may challenge perceptions of Swiss national identity, economists say there is no need to panic. Swiss producers have become more specialized in recent years and the cheeses they export tend to be of the more expensive varieties, such as Gruyère. Imports are cheaper — and softer — and mostly come from France. (What is called “Swiss cheese” in the United States is an American reproduction of Swiss hard cheeses, known, of course, for its distinctive holes.)
Also, not all cheese imported into Switzerland is consumed there. Much of the cheese and quark brought into the country is refined in Switzerland and then exported.
“The trade difference in cheese itself is not something to worry about,” said Martin Mosler, an economist at IWP, an economic policy institute at the University of Lucerne. “We’re better than most of the world at high-end stuff,” he said. Switzerland still has a healthy cheese trade surplus in terms of financial value: Swiss cheese exports average about 10 Swiss francs per kilo (about $11.60), compared to about six Swiss francs per kilo paid for imports.
Inflation has also played a role in the Swiss cheese trade. While 2021 was a record year for Swiss exports, last year saw a decline as Switzerland’s largest market, Germany, was hit hard by inflation, putting pressure on shoppers’ budgets. The strong Swiss franc also made cheese more expensive in Germany.
“These consumers are very price sensitive,” Mr. Mosler said.
In contrast, the strong franc made imports cheaper, and increased imports could be good for Swiss consumers, Mr. Mosler. People want more choice for lower prices and “that’s great for Switzerland itself,” he said.
But Swiss farmers who produce cheaper cheeses could suffer from the shifting trade balance.
According to Robert Finger, a professor at ETH Zurich, a university, milk prices in Switzerland have increased in recent years, including for milk used in cheese. It is not “too bad” yet, but he acknowledged that the number of farms in Switzerland, as in the rest of Europe, has continued to fall. That is not strongly related to higher imports, said Mr. Finger, but is mainly driven by other economic and social developments.
The United States has seen a similar trend, losing about half of its dairy farmers between 1997 and 2017, driven in part by food system consolidation, the disappearance of many small family farms and lower milk prices around the world, said Hannah Tremblay, policy and advocacy advocate at Farm Aid, an agricultural nonprofit.
Mr. Koller, the director of Swissmilk, said it was important to continue producing Swiss cheese for Swiss consumers. One of the goals of his organization is to encourage people to buy local products that meet Switzerland’s high quality and environmental standards.
But apart from the taste, he added that the quality and standards in European Union countries are often not vastly different from those in Switzerland. “There’s no point in just closing the borders on cheese,” said Mr. Mosler.
