Why is cheese more expensive in Canada?

[Dinner]

So I was looking at the news and saw that a Canadian cop was caught smuggling cheese into the country from the US ($200,000 worth of American made cheese which he supposedly could sell in Canada for $365,000) and I'm wondering why Cheese isn't part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. What gives? Why is cheese so expensive in Canada?

http://www.newser.com/story/154864/canadians-bust-cheese-smuggling-cops.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=slate&utm_campaign=greatfinds_rss

[regexcellent]

$165,000 is a nifty profit.

[Dinner]

Arbitrage to be conducted! :yeah:

That's almost an 80% mark up.

[SlowwHand]

Canada recently raised taxes to offset their military expenditures...in Quebec.

[giblets]

This has been discussed here before:

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/199152-Canada-Europe-free-trade-agreement-could-be-final-in-6-months?p=6105352&viewfull=1#post6105352

Basically morons like Oncle Boris think paying ridiculous prices for dairy in order to keep dairy farmers in Canada in business is a sensible policy.

If 30% is the price to protect rural areas, then so be it.

Stability is important in food supply, I believe.

I understand.

The thing is that farming is highly volatile; you're better off with stable prices, even if they average higher. You know that despite these quotas, most dairy farmers are struggling?

Look at what happens to developing countries when the price of corn rises.

Who knows what might happen if Canada imports American dairy. There might be a famine!

[Dinner]

Economically it would make a hell of a lot of sense to rationalize their dairy business if it is so completely uncompetitive. Free trade would push the high cost producers out of business while the big guys will become bigger and more efficient resulting in more cheese and better cheese for everyone.

[Aeson]

Can't blame it all on Canadians, sadly. South of the border the cheese is cheaper at least in part because feed crops are subsidized.

[Dinner]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/09/27/161917296/cheese-smuggling-ring-is-brought-down-in-canda

NPR covers Canadian cheese smuggling.

[Jon Miller]

They could just start a national canadian cheese reserve, and feed the homeless (or school children, but maybe Canada doesn't need to do that) with the older parts of the reserve.

JM

[Jon Miller]

They could just start a national canadian cheese reserve, and feed the homeless (or school children, but maybe Canada doesn't need to do that) with the older parts of the reserve.

JM

[Dinner]

Can't blame it all on Canadians, sadly. South of the border the cheese is cheaper at least in part because feed crops are subsidized.

Are you claiming that Canadian farmers can't purchase low cost feed from the US? It's not like it is hard or expensive to move corn from Iowa to Ontario.

[Ben Kenobi]

So I was looking at the news and saw that a Canadian cop was caught smuggling cheese into the country from the US ($200,000 worth of American made cheese which he supposedly could sell in Canada for $365,000) and I'm wondering why Cheese isn't part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. What gives? Why is cheese so expensive in Canada?

Someone actually did this? I think I actually predicted it in the other thread. Cheese smugglers - only in Canada.

[Aeson]

Are you claiming that Canadian farmers can't purchase low cost feed from the US? It's not like it is hard or expensive to move corn from Iowa to Ontario.

I really don't know how much feed, if any, we export to Canada, or under what restrictions it would be, or if the subsidies would even apply to it in the first place. I would guess that we avoid subsidizing Canadian dairies somehow, since benefiting US agriculture/consumers at the expense of everyone else is essentially the point of our interference in these markets. (Nevermind if it actually helps us out in an absolute sense, which it almost surely doesn't.)

The main point is that "free trade" or "free market" really shouldn't be brought up in a discussion related to US agriculture.

[Aeson]

Some of the subsidies might actually be raising the price of US dairy though. There's the ethanol mandate/subsidies which drive corn prices higher. Then there are farmers being paid not to plant crops on their land to keep prices higher. Combined with all the other subsidies and tariffs it's a mess. Maybe it all cancels out in the end and we really can just blame the Canadians for their high priced cheese. In that case I would blame Quebec, French are notoriously voracious cheese eaters.

[notyoueither]

Canada has supply management of dairy and poultry. The supply is restricted by quotas. That means that dairy and poultry cost more to Canadians than it should. Then we get chesse burglers. It is to be expected, but not from a cop. Oh wait...