5 THEODORA PETER Could you go without your morning coffee in the event of a crisis? In Switzerland, you won’t have to, as the government has contingency planning in place: importers have more than 18,000 tonnes of coffee bean stocks in reserve. This mandatory reserve is enough to meet demand from the country’s coffee drinkers for three months should there be an import outage. The real question is whether coffee, which has practically no nutritional value, is really as important to human survival as wheat or rice. The last time the authorities pondered this issue was during a review in 2019, when plans were made to remove coffee from the country’s emergency stockpile. This was met with strong resistance: not only suppliers but also consumers (bearing in mind that the Swiss are among the world’s foremost coffee drinkers) came out against it. The Federal Council ultimately backed down – not least on “psychological grounds”. Food and warmth Defining which goods are important for survival is “not an exact science”, says Peter Lehmann, head of Compulsory Stocks at the Federal Office for National Economic Supply. The key criterion for foodstuffs is the number of calories: the authorities work on the basis of an average energy consumption of about 2,300 calories per person per day. Accordingly, tens of thousands of tonnes of non-perishable foodstuffs such as rice, wheat, cooking oils and fats, sugar and the ingredients needed to make yeast are stockpiled. The compulsory stocks also hold fertilisers and canola seeds for agriculture. These reserves are enough to meet the needs of Switzerland’s population for three to four months. 13 Swiss francs per person The federal government does not hold the stocks itself. They are provided and managed by the relevant sector, for example grain mills, as they make flour out of wheat. “That means the goods are already where they are needed,” explains Lehmann. The 300 companies involved receive compensation for holding the stocks. This compensation is financed by import surcharges and fees: every inhabitant of the country pays 13 Swiss francs a year towards it. Crisis survival involves more than having enough to eat. “A heated apartment is also a basic requirement,” explains Lehmann. The compulsory stores thus include heating oil and fuels, such as petrol, diesel and aviation gasoline. These reserves are released in the event of supply issues or supply chain gaps. In 2015, a strike in Peter Lehmann, head of Compulsory Stocks at the Federal Office for National Economic Supply. Photo supplied Caffeine in a crisis: importers like La Semeuse in La Chaux-de-Fonds store a mandatory stockpile totalling 18,000 tonnes of green coffee. Photo: Sophie Stieger 13Photo France resulted in a shortage of aviation gasoline at Geneva airport. In 2018, a dry summer caused mineral oil supply issues: low water levels on the Rhine meant the ships could only load their holds up to one third of full capacity. In 2021, the country had to dip into its emergency fertiliser stocks due to supply problems on the global market. The Swiss agricultural sector is fully reliant on imports to meet its demand for fertiliser. The pandemic revealed supply shortfalls The country regularly accesses its strategic medical reserve supplies. From 2019 to 2022, there were 416 instances of medicines being taken from emergency stocks to pre-empt shortages, mainly for antibiotics. At the start of 2024, the authorities initiated additional measures. Obligatory storage and reporting were extended to include other substances in order to mitigate supply bottleneck risks. There were major national supply issues during the coronavirus pandemic, with a shortage of face masks, ethanol and disinfectant. The Swiss Alcohol Board had kept ethanol reserves up to 2017 prior to its dissolution in the interests of deregulation, Swiss Review / March 2024 / No.2
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