Swiss Food For The World

Introduction

It is not so common that people analyze their food consumption and rare those who know the provenance of what’s on their plate. For that reason, we decide to do the job and provide a complete qualitative and quantitative analysis using United Nations FAOSTAT datasets which are known to contain worldwide reliable data covering many topics in agriculture and trade. We present answers on what we eat, where it comes from and what the economical and environmental impacts of our food choices are?

Swiss food composition

Surprisingly, the total amount of food consumption in Switzerland did not have any noticeable changes during the last 50 years. On the other hand, the proportion for each group of products show that swiss people consume a lot of milk products (around 3 times more than any other group of elements).

Since there is no flagrant difference in the total amount of consumption over the years, it is interesting to look at the evolution of the import and the production in Switzerland. Importation has increased quite a lot during the last half century by almost doubling the total amount but the amount of production remains stable across the years. This is explained by the increase of the population, from 5.4 millions to 8.1 millions of swiss citizens.

Thanks to the heatmap on the percentage change for every 10 years, we can clearly observe the evolution for each group of products for the food consumption, the import quantity and the production quantity.

For the consumption, there are some tendencies, as a diminution of the meat consumption for the last 30 years and an augmentation in the consumption of the vegetables. Are these tendencies in the favor of the environment ?

An other interesting fact is the proportion between the import quantity and the production for each of the groups of products in Switzerland. In 2013, the categories where there is the largest proportion of production, between imports, exports and production, are meat and milk products. We can also observe that the only category where the importation than the production is much higher is the fruits.

Swiss food provenance

We looked into the kind of food we are used to eat and how much of it actually comes from Switzerland. However, it still remains unknown at this point where the rest of our food comes from. Since we already analyzed the evolution of our importations throughout the years, it is interesting here to focus on other dimensions such as the provenance of our importations as well as their proportion. For this reason we only study here the most recent data to obtain results that relate to us as much as possible.

We see here that importations remain in Europe most of the time. That being said, there are still many exceptions for some groups. In particular, cereals, fruits and meat are often imported from Brazil, Canada and even Australia.

The information obtained here only goes as far as groups of items however. This is a choice made for better visualization but it would be nice to have an intuitive tool to deep dive further and see in more details what and where we import our food. This is provided here via a sunburst figure. Feel free to click away and explore if you are more interested.

What we learn here is that Switzerland makes efforts to sustain itself by importing food mostly from the neighbouring countries. Despite that, we still have a lot of importations from countries all around the world. We have to ask ourselves why this is necessary and how much of an impact we create on the environment and the economy.

Importations impact on producer Prices

To decide whether the importations have a clear impact on our society or not, we will introduce another parameter: the producer price which is the money the farmers receive after the production of their products. When looking further into the «sunburst» figure, maize appears to have diverse origins of importations, high importation quantity and varying quantity of importations over time. Let’s then analyse it and dive into the maize world …

To have a worldwide representation of the maize producer price, we decided to compare its Switzerland price with different country groups, from lower to upper income economies. This notion is shown in the plot below where we notice a higher producer price in Switzerland compared to the different groups around 1991-1996, as the height of the Switzerland (black) area is much bigger than the country groups. Then, progressively, over the years, we notice a balance producer prices between all countries and Switzerland; upper middle income countries prices are even getting higher. Is it because Switzerland prices dropped or because countries groups prices went up, or both ?

The answer can easily be deduced by looking into the next plot showing the evolution maize price per country group. Indeed, both Switzerland maize prices went down, reaching a minimum producer price around year 2001(50% less) and country groups prices went up. In fact, lower and upper middle income countries have even double there prices in few years. But how could we explain such a phenomenon since Swiss people still like food and are still rich.

A possible explanation lies in the next plot where we compare the evolution of the quantity of importation/exportation of maize in Switzerland with the producer prices. In this plot, we took care to normalize the prices with the inflation rate. Even if the quantity of imported maize is way higher than the exported one, we still can observe an increasing of the producer prices when there is fast increase of the exportation. It appears around year 2002. But what could be the long term reason for a decreasing maize producer price in Switzerland is the increase of their imported quantity over the 15 last years. Indeed, the quantity of imported maize increased by a bit less than 400% which place the maize importation at one of the most imported Item in 2017. We can see it when looking at the sunburst plot.

Impact on the environment

For the sake of studying the Swiss Food carbon footprint, we base our analysis on the most consumed ingredients in the country regrouped together to form the following pie chart in which we present a description of the carbon emissions of each ingredient group.

It is shocking that we find that for every swiss citizen 4.5 tonnes of CO2 are released each year just from milk product consumption, indeed we did not expect to see this result as the meat is known to be the most CO2 carbon releasing. It is interesting to see how the dependence on dairy products in Switzerland can have a serious impact on the environment. We need to mention that to generate those numbers we use the amount of food that is available to the swiss industry and to the population. This way, the fact that there’s more food supplied to the market than the consumers need is taken into consideration

Following up with the previous analysis on the food consumption, it is true that we eat more and more fruits and vegetables and less meat but with the above result we discover that this new meat banning trend is definitely not enough to reduce the swiss carbon footprint. The milk industry is the one to fight since the production, transport, conservation and distribution of the milk and its products is high energy demanding.

Conclusion

To summarize, we hope that this data story was able to provide an insightful view on the most relevant questions one can ask about the food in his plate. We thus still emphasize the need to change our food habits for better environmental awareness given those alarming numbers, even though we know you really like cheese.

References

For the food carbon emissions data, we had access to Eaternity database that was offered to us by Manuel Klarmann, founder & CEO of the eponym project. We deeply thank him for this contribution to our project.