Letter: Why dairy farmers are getting out
Friday 16th September 2011, 6:00AM BST.
Letter: When I joined the Milk Marketing Board in the early 1980s, the price paid to farmers for milk was about 20p a litre and they generally made a reasonable living.
Then the UK was about 80 per cent self-sufficient in milk and our milk was then and remains the highest in quality in the EU.
Thirty years later, the price being paid to farmers remains roughly the same, so it is hardly surprising they are selling below the cost of production and are moving out of milk as has been recently reported.
Despite producing a premium product at a reasonable price, supermarkets, aided and abetted by a few large mega-farms, aimed to squeeze an extra 0.5p a litre in price.
The Government of the day decided to abolish the MMB in the early 90s.
At that point, farmers could (and arguably should) have all opted to join a single co-operative to ensure they retained a scale capable of dealing with the already growing power of the supermarkets.
Instead, a patchwork of milk-buying companies arose, fragmenting the milk supply market and pitting firms against each other.
That has allowed the supermarkets to distort the market in milk, effectively dictating the price they are prepared to pay.
It is therefore hardly surprising that UK farmers are now languishing at the bottom of the EU milk price table.
Andrew Whyte
Shrewsbury
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