Food initiative would sharply reduce Swiss meat production

Switzerland’s food initiative would aim to raise the country’s net self-sufficiency rate from 42 percent to 70 percent within ten years, mainly by reducing food waste and replacing animal feed crops with food for human consumption, SRF reports.

Swiss agriculture currently produces less than half of the food consumed in the country. Adrian Müller of the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture says the two main ways to increase self-sufficiency would be to cut food waste and grow plant-based food instead of feed for livestock.

Less waste, more food for people

About 2.8 million tonnes of food are wasted in Switzerland each year. Cutting this waste by half, as the federal government aims to do, could increase the self-sufficiency rate by just over 10 percentage points, Müller estimates.

Farmers could also grow food for human consumption, such as legumes, on land currently used to produce animal feed such as maize. Only a small part of these fields would continue to be needed for feed. Chicken and pig numbers would fall sharply because the animals mainly eat such feed. Beef and milk production would also decline, but less significantly because cattle and cows also eat grass and hay.

Meat production would fall

In a typical scenario, more than two-thirds of domestic meat production would disappear if Switzerland were to reach a self-sufficiency rate of 70 percent, Müller estimates. The initiative does not specify how much meat people should eat, and additional imports would remain possible. However, this would simply shift the greater environmental burden of livestock production abroad.

A farming system less focused on animal production would emit significantly fewer greenhouse gases and cause less ammonia pollution, Müller says.

Changes across the food system

Isabel Jaisli, a professor of agroecology and food systems at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, says the entire value chain would be affected. Switzerland’s food system is currently strongly geared towards livestock production and has developed that way over decades, she says.

Farmers would have to change their operations and the food industry would have to adapt within ten years. It would also remain to be seen whether consumers would ultimately eat the products produced by the new agricultural system.

The initiative will be put to a vote on September 27, 2026.