The Great Norwegian Butter Drought
It’s almost embarrassing. Well, not almost, it’s very embarrassing. Here we are in Norway, one of the richest countries in the world, and we run out of…butter.
The reason why it’s so embarrassing is that there are very many countries in the world that have far more important things to concern themselves with than running out of butter. Running out of water is just one example. Bread is another. Freedom is another.
But here in mid-December 2011, the butter supply dried up. It’s the wrong verb here, I’m sure. Does a butter supply dry up? Or does it run out? Trickle away? Perhaps it just gets spread too thinly and becomes invisible.
Whatever. It disappeared from the supermarket shelves.
Now Norwegians are a stoical bunch. They are also more willing than most to believe in the infallibility of the status quo. Whereas a Frenchman or Italian might immediately blame the government, a Norwegian will simply buy margarine instead.
However, questions started to be asked. For example: “Where’s the butter?” Christmas was approaching, which is pretty butter-heavy everywhere in Western Europe, and the shelves were empty. How could you make cakes? Puddings? How could you rub it all over yourself and then jump up and down in the snow singing the national anthem?
So obviously the right people to ask were the people who made the butter.
Well, of course, farmers make butter. But just about all the farmers in Norway sell their butter to a sort of cooperative called Tine. Now Tine has a virtual monopoly of the dairy industry in Norway. You won’t find much other butter – if any – on the supermarket shelves and Tine turns over roughly 3 billion US dollars a year with an operating profit of about 80 million dollars in the third quarter of 2011 alone. Which is a heck of a lot of milk.
Nor does Tine enjoy an exactly squeaky-clean reputation. There have been rumours – undoubtedly ill-founded – that Tine has misused its position to squeeze competitors out of the market. But, as I said, the rumours are probably ill-founded and have no truth in them whatsoever.
So what did Tine say when people asked why there was no butter? Well, there were two answers. One appears to have blamed the craze for high-fat, low-carb diets. Yes, it was all the fault of those mad dieters who were drenching their ice creams in litres of melted butter. Or rubbing it all over themselves and then jumping up and down in the snow singing the national anthem.
Sure.
The other answer was that the summer had been wetter than usual and that there was insufficient animal feed as a result.
Now called me old-fashioned if you will, but one of the biggest butter producers in Europe is Ireland. It’s a country on which the god of weather dumps enough rain annually to fill the Mediterranean Basin three times over with still some left over to fill the world’s swimming pools for the next century. So how come we suddenly had Irish butter in the supermarket while Norwegian butter was slightly noticeable by its absence?
And what was even more strange was that there appeared to be no shortage of milk. Or cream, or cheese, or sour cream, or crème fraîche… Just butter. Which, as far as I’m aware, is actually made from milk.
Stern measures were called for, and painful measures were taken. In its efforts to support the 16,000 Norwegian farmers that supply butter to Tine, the government had imposed massive importation tariffs on dairy products. Well, not just on dairy products, to be honest. There are also, for example, massive duties on cars to protect the thriving Norwegian automotive industry.
These tariffs had to be reduced. And they were. Until the end of March 2012, I believe.
As a result, butter turned up in the supermarkets once again. Of course, it wasn’t Norwegian butter: it came from France, Belgium and sunny Ireland. At first it was limited to 250 grams per customer but this was, understandably, soon abandoned. What was rather noticeable – to me at any rate – was that there was no butter from the traditional Nordic allies. No Swedish butter. No Danish butter. Certainly no Finnish butter. Had the same problem afflicted them, or were they just a tad reluctant to bail out a neighbour who had effectively refused to allow their products into the country before?
We will probably never know. Any more than we will ever know the real reason for the Great Norwegian Butter Drought.
As I write this, in February 2012, a couple of months after butter disappeared from the shelves, the first tubs of Tine are finding their way back into the supermarkets. There are still none of the half-kilo bars that we are used to – just modest little tubs so far. But what is clear is that either the dieters have resorted to some other method of boosting their fat intake – margarine or lard perhaps – or that the depleted stocks of animal feed have somehow recovered from the wet summer and are getting back to normal.
As we all know, animal feed, like the human liver, has miraculous regenerative properties.
And so, apparently, has the Norwegian dairy industry.





























