Although it may seem unrealistic, nations all around the world have already been hoarding unusual items like cheese, helium, and maple syrup.
Protecting the markets for particular resources that are important to these nations has been made possible in large part by these strategic reserves. The night before his first White House crypto summit on Friday, President Donald Trump also signed an executive order late Thursday creating a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate digital-asset stockpile for cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.
“Commodity reserves have been crucial to both national security and the economy,” stated Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group.
In the United States, for instance, a strategic reserve for oil (CL00) (CL.1) was established to “protect against foreign adversaries cutting off our supply as well as service disruptions due to storms,” Flynn said. Global central banks have also held gold (GC00) as a store of wealth for generations, and currencies have been backed by gold and silver (SI00).
Stockpiles of helium and cheese in the United States, maple syrup in Canada, and a seed vault in Norway to guard against the loss of crop diversity are a few of these more unique reserves.
“Many of these reserves have served a real purpose,” Libertas Wealth Management Group president and senior financial adviser Adam Koos stated. For example, Canada’s maple syrup reserve can stop price falls from overproduction, while the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used several times in reaction to oil crises, he said.
“When swine flu devastated China’s pig population, China’s pork reserves helped stabilize supply,” Koos added. Even the U.S. cheese reserve “helped dairy farmers when the market was oversaturated, even though it sounds crazy.”
Let’s examine each of these strategic stocks in more detail.
In America, government cheese
The government’s efforts to support farmers and stabilize dairy prices resulted in the U.S. cheese stockpile (CSCJ25).
According to History, a brand owned by A&E Networks, the government of President Jimmy Carter implemented a subsidy program in 1977 that invested $2 billion over four years in the dairy industry to assist raise the low costs of dairy at the time.
Dairy producers began to maximize their milk production (DA00) in order to benefit from government assistance. After that, the government bought the milk that dairy producers were unable to sell and turned it into dehydrated milk powder, cheese, and butter. With a longer shelf life, the cheese supply eventually grew to almost 500 million pounds and was kept in hundreds of warehouses.
But in the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, 300 million pounds of cheese from the stockpile were finally distributed to the poor because officials were unsure of the product’s shelf life.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent Cold Storage report, which examines the quantity of items kept in commercial and public warehouses, as of January 31, the total natural cheese stockpiles across all warehouses were 1.374 billion pounds. According to a Visual Capitalist study that cites USDA and IMF data, a large portion of the stockpile is made up of American, Swiss, and cheddar cheeses.
When questioned if the cheese inventories in cold storage belonged to the U.S. government, a USDA representative stated that the department was “required by law to maintain respondent and data privacy, and cannot reveal individual operations, producers, ranchers or facilities.” However, according to other sources, the stocks are owned commercially by supply chain participants rather than by the government.
Canada’s syrup swimming pools
The only maple syrup reserve in the world is located in Canada and was established by Québec maple growers. Regardless of the performance of any given harvest, it guarantees a steady supply to the domestic and foreign markets, according to Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec (PPAQ), or Quebec Maple Syrup Producers in English. It additionally “stabilizes product prices, and eliminates the swings typically caused by shortage or surplus.”
Three warehouses totaling 133 million pounds, or 216,000 barrels, are used to store the syrup. They can store enough syrup to fill 53 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That amounts to 400 million Canadian dollars (USDCAD) at full capacity.
According to PPAQ spokesperson Joël Vaudeville, the reserve now has 45 million liters, as reported by MarketWatch. It is approximately equivalent to 130.95 million pounds of maple syrup.
“The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve has been fully fulfilling its role since its creation in 2000,” stated Vaudeville.
The surplus is placed in inventory in the reserve when a maple season yields more maple syrup than Canadian and foreign consumers need, he said. “When maple production is insufficient to meet demand, the syrup in reserve is used to make up for it.”
According to Vaudeville, “malicious individuals” actually planned a maple-syrup theft in 2011 and 2012, targeting the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. At the time, around 7 million pounds of syrup—worth about C$18 million, or more than $12 million in today’s currency—were taken. “A lot of it was recovered, but the rest was covered by insurance, and then different security measures were implemented,” he said.
According to Ben Newsom, an analyst with commodity commentary and analysis firm Darin Newsom Analysis, Canada’s maple syrup reserve may be the “best example of a unique working reserve,” notwithstanding the “Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.” According to him, it has traditionally been shown to offer stability to the syrup market for both producers and consumers.
China’s emergency supply of pork
In order to manage price fluctuations, China established a pork reserve in the 1970s. however the precise scale of the stockpile is kept secret by the Chinese government, the reserve’s current size is unknown, however China’s commerce ministry stated in 2019 that it had increased to about 200,000 tons.
Over the past few years, the Chinese government has periodically released some of its pork stockpiles to keep prices stable during periods when there was a shortage of meat. For instance, when a swine disease outbreak hit the nation’s pig population in 2019, the government turned to pork reserves. Ahead of significant celebrations and holidays like the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival, when the well-liked protein would be in high demand, it has also drawn from its pork stockpile.
The National Development and Reform Commission, a government agency, owns and oversees China’s pork reserves. Instead of being kept in one place, the pork stockpile is spread among several warehouses across the country.
America’s pipeline for helium
Despite the fact that most people only think of birthday balloons, helium is essential for a number of manufacturing, aerospace, and medical testing processes, including MRIs. The nonflammable gas has also been produced in large quantities in the United States.
According to sources, 30% of the helium produced worldwide has come from a helium resource that is housed in a massive subterranean pipeline that runs through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. According to the United States Geological Survey, as of 2023, the total amount of helium stored in the stockpile was 1.49 billion cubic feet.
The remaining helium reserves in the United States were then sold to industrial-gas giant Messer for $460 million last year.
From the archives: It’s time for investors to take notice as helium is recovering from a ten-year shortage.
“The sale of the Federal Helium System and subsequent transfer of funds marks the end of an era and a successful transition to private industry,” stated Melanie Barnes, head of the Bureau of Land Management’s New Mexico state office, in a statement released in December 2024. “The Department of the Interior and the BLM commend the efforts of all involved in this process, including ensuring that maximum value was obtained as part of this historic shift.”
The Arctic seed vault in Norway
In a vault close to the North Pole, Norway maintains a stockpile of more than one million seeds.
According to its website, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established by the Norwegian government in 2008 as a “global backstop” and “insurance policy” to protect seeds for the future food supply of humanity.
About 1.3 million food crop seed samples, including rice (RR00), beans, and wheat (W00), are kept at the Arctic Circle vault. Protecting seed duplicates is intended to preserve planet genetic variety, which is the basis of the world’s food production.
Additionally, the Arctic Circle is the ideal location for the seed vault because of the permafrost and thick rock there, which guarantee that the seed samples will stay frozen even in the absence of electricity. This is because seeds are best stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius.
Since its contents would largely only be required in the event of a natural calamity or worldwide catastrophe endangering the food supply, many have nicknamed this marvel a “doomsday” vault.
Depositors, not the Norwegian government, still own the seeds in the vault.
What about cryptocurrency reserves, then?
In order to provide their governments with a store of wealth, central banks all over the world have piled up record amounts of gold. According to Flynn of the Price Futures Group, cryptocurrencies (BTCUSD) and ETHUSD might do the same if they are recognized as a form of digital gold.
