This was included in a special EU CofA report entitled, ‘Have the management instruments applied to the market in milk and milk products achieved their main objectives?’, made public on 15 October in Brussels.
“Failing this, the Commission’s objective of keeping to a minimum level of regulation, of the safety net type, might rapidly prove impossible to fulfil,” warned the court.
The EU’s dairy policy, it continued, aims to achieve wide and “somewhat conflicting” objectives, including reaching market equilibrium, stabilising the prices of milk and milk products, ensuring a fair standard of living for producers and improving the competitiveness of European milk products.
The Court of Auditors also advised the Commission to monitor price formation on a regular basis. The concentration of processing and distribution companies must not reduce dairy farmers to “mere price-takers” and must not restrict opportunities for final consumers to benefit fairly from decreases in prices.
The report also points out the need to pursue in-depth reflection on strategies to tackle the special problems of those regions where milk production is most vulnerable, in particular in mountainous areas, and to tackle the environmental consequences of a geographical concentration of milk production.
Austria, Cyprus, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands surpassed their milk production quotas for 2008-2009 and are expected to be penalised, according to provisional figures released by the European Commission, also on 15 October.
The overrun amounts to 348,400 tonnes. In most EU member states, milk deliveries declined slightly or didn’t change, whereas the quota increased by 3.4 million tonnes. The total quota available for deliveries to dairies, 142.9 million tonnes, wasn’t used in full. The deficit is 5.381 million tonnes, notes the EU executive.
“With output more than 4% below quota, it’s clear that low farm gate prices over the past few months have nothing to do with the gradual phase-out of the quota system,” said agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel.
The biggest deficits compared with the national quota allocation were in the UK (1.45 million unused tonnes) and France (1.2 million unused tonnes).
Source: Euro Politics
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