Nina Chausow
A UNION between Spain’s top milk producers is hoping to increase the price of milk and save the industry.
The National Market Commission approved the joint regulation on the Corporacion Alimentaria Penasanta and Leche Celta in order to raise milk prices, which plummeted following the abolishing of Europe’s quota system.
Both companies will now sell their milk under the same brand.
The EU milk quota system, which started in 1984, was scrapped in April in order to make the EU dairy business competitive against African and Asian markets.
Experts believe this change, which merges 50% of both companies, is an attempt to combat the market domination of the French company Lactalis.
Just shows how crap the EU is – competing with Africa and Asia – insanity. All over Europe hard working dairy farmers are not only going out of business but are committing suicide.
Time for governments to dictate the price paid to farmers and to stop outside milk from being imported by greedy retailers who only want to increase their profit margins at the expense of other people in their countries – sounds like treason to me.
Stuart, is milk somehow different from the market for anything else? Prices fluctuate – and that’s it.
If an inate product drops in price you can stockpile and sell when the price rises or you can stop mining altogether. Farming is’nt a case of turning on a switch.
It takes a long time to build up a productive dairy herd and there is a base cost to produce a litre of milk. No dairy farmer can go on operating at a loss. So using your ‘market mentality’ let the farmers go bust, who cares about them, certainly not you. So to use your totally selfish ‘logic’, when the foreign source for milk knows that all your dairy herds have been slaughtered for dog food they can then charge you whatever they like – pay or go without.
Milk used to be a part of a good diet adding a lot of health benefits. The UK government has near enough wiped this out through regulation and now we get flavoured water after being pasteurised and homogenised nearly all the benefits of the milk have gone. Then they sell you Yakult which is made from sterilised milk and bacteria to try and replace what was removed.
In the UK milk is cheaper than water, and the old Milkman is disappearing fast.
It would be nice to go back to raw milk sales being freely available, the heath benefits far outweigh and downsides. This would also mean farmers can sell direct to the public and get better prices that they deserve.
So it’s the same as any capital intensive industry then. Let’s ban imports of cars, clothes, furniture…..
Dave
if we lost our agricultural industry, in few years we can suffer famine.
In the book “Cathedral of the Sea” you can read a shocking history about a famine suffered in Barcelona in the year 1000 a.C (?). This famine was motivated because in Catalonia the farmers prefered to raise growths different of wheat.
You’ll probably are relatively young and for you are too far away the times of scarcity of the Second World War, but I think that with the food security we should not to play.
And we don´t forget that the “free market” is a fiction,as the same Adam Smith wrote.
Just to be on the safe side I think that the borders of Malaga province should be secured to stop any dairy foods coming in from producers in Cadiz or Granada. That way we’ll be really sure of the supply…..not!
Food security comes from having multiple suppliers. That way we get low prices in good times and protection from famine, drought and demagogues in bad.
I am too young to have experienced WWII, but educated enough to have studied David Ricardo. These claims that “our sector is special” are precisely what Adam Smith wrote about in the Wealth of Nations – they are an excuse to cheat the consumer, and consumers tend to outnumber the producers by hundreds to one. Unfortunately the producers are better organised.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
—Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)