No way can producers accept a reduction in price (despite previous price increases) … most farmers were still producing milk for less than the cost of production etc …
You would assume that the article had probably been written last week when the milk price crisis became headline news and triggered a furious reaction from dairy farmers across the UK.
In fact, I wrote the article in a UK dairy trade magazine in March 2003. It was written as the industry was waiting for the KPMG report into milk pricing; a report it was hoped would bring some future stability and direction to the industry.
So here we are, nine and a half years on, and milk price is still a highly emotive issue.
On Wednesday, UK farm minister Jim Paice is to hold a dairy summit in London with industry leaders. News of the summit came after more than 500 producers gathered for an emergency meeting last week at the Staffordshire Showground.
The milk price cuts announced recently by milk processors could potentially wipe more than £50,000 off the average dairy farm income, and many farmers are being paid less than the cost of production for every litre of milk.
So has anything changed? Well, I think the reaction to the announcement of price cuts seems to have been stronger than I can remember before, and have made use of the social media environment, with e-petitions online and the #sosmilk campaign on Twitter.
NFU dairy board chairman Mansel Raymond said he was overwhelmed by the number of farmers who turned up to the meeting, held with less than 24 hours’ notice: “It just goes to show the seriousness of the situation,” he told a reporter.
“If this isn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what is,” said Raymond. People were at the end of their tether and the constant price squeeze from the top of the supply chain down to the producer had to stop.
‘Wake-up calls’, ‘end of their tether’, ‘price squeeze has to stop’. I can’t help but think I have heard these phrases before. It puts you in mind of the ‘Greek crisis will lead to Euro exit’ and ‘Euro crisis will break up the single currency’ headlines that we’ve read almost every month for the past two years or so. And we still wait for the predictions to come to pass.
But this time I really hope that the meetings and the protests will achieve their aim, because dairy farmers deserve it and we need to find a way to guarantee a future for this great industry.
Jim Paice says he’s prepared to ‘bang heads together’ to get agreement.
Let’s hope he doesn’t need to, but stock up on the headache pills just in case!
Geoff Platt is editor of Dairy Innovation magazine.
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