Posted on 09/19/2009 12:09:58 AM PDT by lainie
...Milk dumped on roads and farmland to protest drastically lower prices...
European milk farmers have dumped three million litres of fresh milk onto pastures and roads in a massive, organized protest against lowered dairy prices.
In Belgium, farmers spread milk across roads near the southern town of Ciney. Elsewhere, about 300 tractors dragged milk containers through plowed fields in southern Belgium, dumping a day's worth of milk production in that region.
"It is a scandal to dump this, but we have to realize what the situation is," said Belgian farm leader Erwin Schoepges. "We need a farm revolt."
Milk farmers say world prices have gone so low that they had to sell at half the production cost, leaving more farmers unable to pay their bills.
Prices have fallen 40 per cent since the spring, and European dairy farms are set to lose the equivalent of $14 billion this year unless the situation is remedied.
On Tuesday, farmers closed Belgian border crossings to the Netherlands and to Germany to push demands for higher prices.
Most EU nations want to shore up milk prices but they disagree on how to do that. The EU head office opposes a lowering of quotas, but the quotas are scheduled to end in 2015.
Since the recovery from the Second World War, agriculture is one of the most shielded sectors of the European economy, as governments have sought to end hunger and rationing by paying farmers to increase food production.
But despite decades of being largely exempt from free market forces, farmers have not been protected by governments from the global financial crisis that caused demand to crash.
dumping all that milk will definitely raise the price. lol.
Lesson to be Learned: When you become dependent on the government for subsidies over time you become the prison b-tch of the government.
Click on the link. US dairy farmers are upset too
When milk prices were high they bought-bred another 190,000 dairy cows and production soared.
WHICH causes prices to fall. Did demand increase with all of this new production? I doubt it. Who knows?
Mish is smart.
This paragraph should tell the idiots all they need to know about this situation. "Protect them from the free market?". That is the whole trouble, you can't have a government run market locally and expect to compete competitively against a free world market(at least part of it is free). Evidently some one is able to produce milk and sell it at about half the price these guys can. If they would get the government out of their business they would fare a lot better.
Freaking idiots, all of them!
Duck and hold your nose.
Don’t cry over spilled milk.
Saw a great bumper sticker the other day: Sure you can trust the government, just ask any indian.
Doubtless thats true, but I don't think its the problem here. It's not like China could export milk across the world and have it stay fresh :0)
Supply is greater than it should be because supply is subsidised. Demand is - I guess - temporarily reduced due to the credit crunch.
These milk farmers are wards of Government and (to that extent) they don't live in the real world. They are used to sucking off the Government teat (no pun intended) and so of course Government is their first recourse in time of trouble.
how much does milk cost, in Belgium?
last time I looked,
it was $1.99 a gallon, here
You should put that comment in bold. It needs to be seen by more!
Yes, that also, and I should have said that in my comment. Thanks.
I’m not sure. One of the points is they want the government to artificially inflate the price they get. They don’t seem to understand or like supply and demand at all. When the price here jumped, dairies added more cows, which meant more milk, but apparently there wasn’t more demand. So the price naturally dropped.
Euro-dairies want to be subsidized by taxpayers.
In some parts of the world its common to make powdered milk and then add water elsewhere. Sounds gross to me. Never fly in this country I think.
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