The last days of the mercifully-departed administration were really busy, and it will probably take months to unravel all the mischief the Bush gnomes wrought. One of the inadvertently hilarious things that was done was raising the import duty on Roquefort cheese to... 300%. If you live in the village of Roquefort and make this cheese, you may not find it so hilarious. On the other hand, I doubt that, even though the US imports of Roquefort may be effectively stopped by this duty, any of the cheesy blue-veined goodness will remain uneaten. However, it will not be eaten by me, unless Obama administration comes to the rescue.
First, some background.
People in the Europeans don't like funny hormones in their beef. They imposed a ban on the hormone-treated US beef, which actually pre-dates the European Union. The ban originally took effect in the 1980s. The justification for the ban (of course, disputed by the US) is that one of the hormones in the US beef is linked to cancer. The ban has been renewed several times. In the Nineties, the World Trade Organization ruled that the US can impose duties on certain European products for as long as the ban on hormone-treated beef is in effect. There were several updated WTO rulings specifying exactly how big a duty is fair in this tit-for-tat, the last one coming out in October 2008. Check this Europolitics article for more info.
Anyways, the duties existed for about a decade, and involved tariffs raising the prices of a number of yummy European imports. Most of them had nothing to do with beef, because very little EU beef ever makes it to the US. Fair or unfair, both sides got used to the situation...
But this is what's happening now.
On Jan. 13, Susan C. Schwab, the trade representative of the outgoing and now all out-gone, thank the powers that be, administration, announced a number of measures taken to continue the retaliation against the European Union beef ban, and in "compliance" with the latest (Oct. 2008) WTO ruling. These measures included raising the duty on Roquefort cheese (image source: fromagedumois.org) from an already hefty 100% to a totally ridiculous 300%. (I used this Washington Post article as a source.)
People in the quaint village of Roquefort, France, are understandably pissed. From the same Washington Post article...
Roquefort got hit with such a high duty that it amounts to a ban, they complain. In their view, this unfairly undermines not only the economy of Roquefort, which depends entirely on cheese, but also the well-being of the 4,500 people who herd special ewes on 2,100 farms producing milk for Roquefort
Mind you, Roquefort is the only place where Roquefort can be made - it requires a unique combination of climate, the diet of the ewes who are milked to make the cheese (it's raw sheep milk!), and the peculiar blue cave mold of the area to produce the much-coveted, blue-veined, delicately textured, stinky delicacy. To be deprived of it will be a heavy loss for me and many others. It goes so well with wine... not even necessarily a French wine - some of the stuff that comes from Carneros Valley is just perfect with Roquefort... Sigh.
On the bright side, the effective ban of Roquefort in the US becomes active only in late March, so the Obama administration may have enough time to reverse this idiocy.
Now, my hypothesis explaining this benighted banning of Roquefort is that the domestic stinky cheese Rush Limburger (my artistic rendition on the left) used his strange psychic influence on the Republicans to do away with a foreign competitor. While the sources of cheesy knowledge in Europe may offer a different interpretation, I strongly suspect stinky cheese Limburger is behind this.