On a recent morning in Gouda, a small city in the Netherlands, hundreds of wheels of yellow cheese lay out in rows on the cobblestones of the town square, a backdrop to the city’s weekly cheese market, which dates to the Middle Ages.
Ad van Kluijve, a farmer dressed in blue work shirt, red bandanna, blue cap and wooden clogs, haggled with a buyer over the price of his latest batch of “jong belegen,” famous for its mild caramel flavor. In the rest of the world, it is one of many cheeses named after the city in which it is traded.
The haggling is largely a performance for tourists as the actual price negotiations take place elsewhere. The cheese industry in the region is very real, though, accounting for about 60 percent of the national cheese production, with an export value of $1.7 billion annually, according to ZuivelNL, which represents the Dutch dairy sector.
But it’s unlikely the cheese market will be here in 50 to 100 years because of a confluence of a few factors, experts say: The city, built on peat marsh, has always been vulnerable to sinking, and that risk is now greater because increased rainfall and rising sea levels — a consequence of climate change — threaten to flood the river delta in which it sits.
“We’re not in good shape,” said Gilles Erkens, a professor at Utrecht University and the head of a team focused on land subsidence at Deltares, a nonprofit research institute. “It’s a very worrisome situation.”