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Cyprus has very few things to celebrate but being the birthplace of halloumi is one of them, a white cheese wonder that is taking over the culinary world.
What could possibly go wrong, everybody loves the squeaky cheese that can be barbecued and there’s a hard variety for the staunch traditionalists to throw against the wall or grate on your spag bol.
Halloumi is the island’s number one food export – worth a cool €200 mln – that has even got the Chinese excited about its mystery qualities. So, you would assume the traditional cheese has its name and origin protected because it is the essence of Cyprus.
Somehow, the guardians of our best-loved cheese have managed to undermine its value, quarrelled over how you should actually make the product, lost the trademark in its largest export market the UK and now the EU won’t protect its designated origin with a PDO.
Only Cyprus could make a mess of a national treasure while leaving its future unprotected, uncertain and under threat. Losing the halloumi brand would be tantamount to the French losing their Champagne label to incompetence or Parma ham being made in Poland – it should never happen.
Things have got so bad that Cyprus has gone slightly Eurosceptic in blaming the European Union for blocking full name protection of halloumi like other admired products of geographical origin.
Nicosia’s protected designation of origin (PDO) file has been stuck down the sofa of a faceless Brussels department for nearly four years when the process should have taken no longer than 10 months.
With no sign of any movement on the issue, President Anastasiades took the unusual step of composing a rather abrasive letter to his friend and EU Commission President Jean Claude Juncker urging him to pull his finger out (wherever it may be stuck).
He called on Brussels to speed matters up several gears because halloumi was coming under fire by outsiders trying to steal it for themselves.
Cyprus is displeased that the PDO file is linked to the island’s division and Green Line trade that allows Turkish Cypriots to sell their own locally made produce, including halloumi.
The PDO file was made when the optimism of a possible Cyprus peace deal was still in positive territory under the delusion that Cypriots could get to like each other if they could only wake up and smell the gas revenue.
We may have tricked our way into the European Union by way of the reviled Annan Plan, but the Europeans are not going to fall for that ‘peace in our time’ spiel for a second time around.
In turn, Brussels is less than delighted with the government trying to set different conditions for their halloumi file, as was agreed in 2015 when Cypriot leaders were talking to each other and building bridges.
Most of those bridges were blown up at Crans-Montana in July 2017 with no sign of a resumption of talks on the near horizon. This has left the rubbery cheese stuck in no man’s land with the government firing blanks from the trenches and unable to retrieve it.
There is also a fear that the EU will allow the Turkish Cypriots to directly export halloumi, or hellim as it is called in Turkish, without going through the recognized ports of the Republic.
Cyprus feels it is being treated harshly by Brussels and that PDO registration procedure of other products will get the same cold shoulder treatment of being placed on the back burner until a peace deal comes along.
Anastasiades has taken a stand by arguing all the conditions of the halloumi file have been met while the EU has contravened its own rules on the PDO by sitting on the application for four years.
If this wasn’t enough, the government has appointed an investigator into what went down in the UK that saw Cyprus lose its halloumi trademark, last year, for its biggest market.
Like when most things go pear-shaped on this island of misadventure, more often than not, there is a special blend of arrogance, incompetence and ignorance involved.
And not to mention that Cypriot trait of “it will be alright on the night” mentality, well, of course, it isn’t, and we have lost more than halloumi to prove that scenario wrong.
When Cypriot leaders meet next week to try and mend a broken peace process that died in the water in 2017, they may be inspired to save our halloumi heritage along with everything else that needs fixing.
On second thoughts you might want to start making your own.
