America can’t eat its way out of this massive cheese problem [View all]

[Recursion]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-cant-eat-its-way-out-of-this-massive-cheese-problem/2016/05/25/976e96c4-228a-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already, here comes a new issue: The Great Cheese Glut of 2016. The Wall Street Journal reports that as of March 31, 1.19 billion pounds had accumulated in commercial cold-storage freezers across the United States, the largest stockpile ever.

...

Thanks, Obama! Just kidding. It’s more like “Thanks, Putin.” In August 2014, he banned European Union agricultural imports as payback for E.U. sanctions punishing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin struck just as the European Union was ending dairy production limits, so the loss of the Russian market was doubly painful to E.U. producers — and rendered them desperate for markets elsewhere. Throw in a stronger dollar due to Federal Reserve policy (thanks, Janet Yellen) — et voila! — U.S. cheese imports are rising.

...

What is to be done? We could try to eat through the problem. You laugh, but the current level of per capita cheese consumption in the United States is 64 percent higher than it was in 1975, due partly to a richer society’s growing taste for richer foods. In the short run, consumption might go up a bit, since the glut is making cheese cheaper.

What’s more, the U.S. government has a long-standing pro-cheese-eating policy, which grew out of the need to do something with the subsidized excess of milk products generated by federal pro-production dairy policy — which, in turn, has persisted for decades despite declining consumer interest in drinking milk.