Australian Cheese – a lot exported and a lot imported

Australia prides itself on being an export nation for dairy products.

One of the major exports is Cheese.

Looking at some figures that are available, freely on the Internet from credible sources, that is the USDA.

It can be seen that Australia exports something like 45% of the cheese that is made in the country.

A counter argument to this is that, Australia imports, 28% of the amount of cheese that it produces. To put this into perspective, about 105,000 tons of cheese were imported into Australia last year.

As with all statistics there are lots of ways to look at it. One of the ways that I sorted the data that was available from indexmundi was – per capita (per person) imports.

Australia wins, By importing over 4 kg of cheese per person every year – that is a lot.

The figures can be seen on the attached table.

My concern is that Australia while saying that it’s a great export nation for a Dairy is also a great dairy import nation.