According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Switzerland is subsidizing more than 70% of its agriculture compared to 35% in the EU. The 2007 Agricultural Program, recently adopted by the Swiss Federal Assembly, will increase subsidies by CHF 63 million to CHF 14.092 billion.

Protectionism acts to promote domestic production, but not to reduce prices or the cost of production, and there is no guarantee the increased domestic production is actually consumed internally; it may simply be being exported, to the profit of the producers.
But 90 to 100% of potatoes, pork, veal, cattle and most milk products, are produced in the country. Beyond that, Swiss agriculture meets sixty-five per cent of the domestic food demand.[16]

Prices are not reduced because, in the absence of import tariffs, the price of food would settle to that of the cheapest provider (which would often be external to Switzerland thus more costly in food miles). Import tariffs rise the price of food and Swiss domestic production only has to be cheaper than these artificially raised prices. The consumer pays more than they otherwise would.

The cost of production is not reduced by subsidy; it merely makes the final point-of-sale price lower than it would otherwise be, since some of the cost of production is born by the State. However, the State obtains the money for the subsidy by taxation, which falls ultimately on the consumer. Subsidy merely alters who pays for what (although in this case it now pays for farming practices that are environmentally respectuous). Furthermore, if the food products produced are in fact being exported, the subsidy of their production costs makes them unusually competitive in the world market, which increases the profits of the producers; in other words, the State is in fact taxing the local population with an outcome which is actually merely to increase the profit of food producers.