Hard cheese Saturday December 08, 2007 Home Return to       In the News Hard cheese Due to federal quotas, prices for imports have skyrocketed. If you can find them. Roger Bird, Citizen Special Published: Saturday, December 08, 2007 Your local cheese shop is scraping the bottom of the "imported" barrel lately. A lot of varieties are missing, or if they are there on display, the price is through the roof. Among them: British Stilton, French epoisse or tomme de Savoie, the President line of brie and Camembert and parmigiano reggiano from Italy. And they are just a few of more than 80 imports, "mostly French varieties," in short supply, says Brenda Smith, manager of House of Cheese in the ByWard Market. Pat Nicastro of the Bottega Nicastro on George Street in the Market, struggles with a huge provolone cheese and a smaller taleggio, both of which retail for $35 a kilo. The quotas on imported cheeses have dramatically forced up prices of specialty cheeses at year-end. At International Cheese just down the street, Edmond Saikaly says, "We ran out of most Swiss cheeses about a month ago." It's early winter and what's simply referred to as "the quota" is really starting to bite. "In the past, it started to hurt in November, but these past few years it's been starting in October. It's getting earlier all the time," Ms. Smith says. Pat Nicastro at La Bottega on nearby George Street says, "cheese is overpriced everywhere at this time of year. It's like buying gold. In 25 years, the price has almost tripled." The tariff rate quota for imported cheeses of all types has been around a long time, part of what economists call "a supply management system" enforced by the federal government for dairy products. The cheese quota was established in 1975 at 22,680 metric tonnes, then reduced in 1978 to 20,412 tonnes. The quota has been unchanged ever since. In 1978, Canada's population was about 24 million. Today, it's 33 million. So, for almost 30 years there has been a lid on cheese imports in the face of a 37-per-cent increase in population. Mr. Nicastro is frustrated because, he says, not only are there more customers in general, but "they are more worldly, more adventurous in their tastes than people 30 years ago." The LCBO's holiday season edition of its Food and Drink magazine reflects this. One article highlights cheese and wine combinations. Five of them feature imported cheeses, and most of them (Stilton, epoisses, chabichou, manchego) are indeed available locally, but at prices inflated way beyond their summer levels. Mr. Nicastro was out of tomme de Savoie in late November. House of Cheese managed to find some, but the price is $57.50 per kilogram, about $15 higher than a few months ago. That's fine maybe for Government House (one of the store's customers), but not the rest of us. Mr. Nicastro is also short on parmigiano reggiano. So is his father, Joe, is at the Nicastro store on Merivale Road. "Short" translates into "expensive." "That's the No. 1 stolen cheese in supermarkets in Italy," Joe Nicastro says. "Italian-Canadians want it above all others." "If we don't have a cheese, it's unlikely to be anywhere," Ms. Smith says. Well, actually it's somewhere. It's in containers sitting on the dock in Montreal or stored in a warehouse nearby, to be released in December, or January when the 2008 quota kicks in for importers. Ms. Smith is pondering an invoice from a major supplier. It has 15 cheeses in the "ordered" column, and 13 zeros under the "delivered" column. In reality only one, pasteurized St-Paulin, made it to the store. Those others will stay undelivered until the new year. "Suppliers were telling us in August to be careful not to sell too much before the holiday season," says Patrick Nicastro. "We bought a lot ahead of time, but had to rent space to hold it. That puts the price up." Everyone -- retailers, wholesalers and importers, officials at the Department of International Trade -- agrees the quota is in place to protect the Canadian dairy industry and cheese producers. Jacques Laforge, president of Dairy Farmers of Canada, says, "Nobody is planning to boost the quota generally," though there are minor exemptions granted for small special shipments. Beyond that, anyone can bring in the cheese, but if it's over the quota the tariff is about 250 per cent. Mr. Laforge says Canadian cheese producers have more than covered the shortfall as the population has increased in the face of an unchanged quota. A spokesman for Agropur, the Canadian cheese industry's largest producer and importer, agrees. Jean Brodeur, vice-president of communications and public relations, says there are real benefits to the quota. "Production of fine cheeses, 'artisan cheeses' from small producers, especially in Quebec and British Columbia, has gone up dramatically," since the quota was introduced. He says Canada now has as many cheeses as France had in the 1960s when then-president Charles de Gaulle made his wry complaint, "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? Agropur, like many of the big importers, has bought up many cheese producers (Vache qui rit and Baby Bell among them) and importers -- and their quota. Over time there have been fewer and fewer large companies. (Quota can be bought and sold among importers with the approval of the Export and Import Controls Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.) It's the same at the production end. The Dairy Farmers of Canada website says this country has about 16,000 dairy farms populated by about a million cows. Thirty years ago when the quota went into effect there were about 120,000 farms. "Maybe the 22.4 tonnes doesn't do the job anymore," Mr. Brodeur conceded. "But at the same time we're winning international prizes for our fine cheeses." Martin Villanueva of Tree of Life food importers says the quota "affects prices and availability coast to coast," and hasn't changed partly because "a lot of people don't know about it. "Our sales staff complain. Our customers (retail cheese shops) are always complaining." But the public doesn't know what they're up against. Donald Kubesh, the lawyer for the International Cheese Council of Canada, a group set up to take on the quota, says that during the 1980s and 1990s, the council made "serious but unsuccessful" representations to the federal government to boost the quota, but the dairy lobby was too powerful. "Dairy farmers in Canada feel, rightly or wrongly, that any additional imports of cheese directly affect their market. They think they would lose one-for-one, kilogram for kilogram against imports. It takes 10 kilograms of milk to make one kilogram of cheese. They are not in favour of increasing the quota. "This cheese is coming into Canada in quantities which are stimulating for the growth of similar cheeses in Canada. Dairy farmers then take the demand created by imported cheese and use domestic milk to create similar cheeses. "If you expanded those quotas, supply management would be harmed, in the opinion of the dairy farmers. They think drop in demand for domestic milk would put all those marginal dairy farmers out of business, the ones with the 60 or 70 cows. With them gone, the whole political strength of the dairy farmers would be gone." Mr. Kubesh said there was a proposal before Treasury Board for new "cheese compositional standards" -- rules on how to make cheese -- requiring specific ratios of protein in the final product. If approved, the new rules would effectively bar a lot of cheese imports. If those bries and Camemberts can no longer come in, we'll be eating the Canadian knock-offs, which will start up to cover the gap," Mr. Kubesh says. "Those standards would be unique to Canada. It is possible that they would bar even Cheddar cheese from England. "It's all because the Conservatives want the votes of Quebec dairy farmers." A senior official at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada said in a phone interview that the quota is unlikely to change because it is part of WTO agreements and every country protects its agricultural sector. "From a negotiator's point of view, we won't give up (the quota) until other countries give something in return." In November 2005, MPs voted 288 to zero that "the government should give its negotiators a mandate during the negotiations at the WTO so that ... the supply management sectors are subject to ... no increase in tariff quotas ..." Two years after that vote, Pat Nicastro is in his office reading the October issue of Foodservice News. The front page headline reads, "Canada holds on to world record for high dairy prices!" If you're a cheese lover, get used to it.