Allister disappointed by Commission’s dairy report
10 August 2009
TUV Leader Jim Allister has expressed disappointment at the overall outcome of the EU Commission’s report on dairy markets. The former MEP welcomed the Commission’s recognition that processors and retailers were retaining the value added in the dairy market, instead of allowing it to tumble down to the milk price paid to farmers, and criticism that while the retail price of dairy products has barely fallen, farmgate prices have fallen by 33%, but said the report was short on answers and lacked clear direction.
In a statement Mr Allister said:-
“This long-awaited report had raised expectations that the Commission at last would grasp the nettle over milk prices. Instead I find it spends much of its time justifying and perpetuating past stances which are failing. In this regard I have three things in mind:
a) its stubborn refusal to rethink the ending of quotas in circumstances where increased production can only further suppress the price;
b) its related rejection of reducing dairy cow number through a subsidised culling scheme, as is now happening in the USA, and which could have been linked to a retirement scheme;
c) the foolish suggestion that member states could impose a superlevy on individual producers, which contradicts the reality preached elsewhere that economies of scale must be attained.
The inability of the Commission to think outside its existing box and its clinging to inadequate and failing measures does not auger well for much salvation for the dairy sector emanating from Brussels.
Indeed within this report I detect much designed to pass the buck back to the member states. Of particular note in this regard is the talk of lifting the state aid threshold. This is a device to shift the onus for supporting the industry away from Brussels and in reality would induce anti-competitive pressures, as the producers of state aid shy countries, like the UK, would suffer. There would be little hope for Northern Ireland producers in this trend.
The report is robust in identifying the imbalance in returns between producers and processors/retailers, but it fails to carry through these criticisms by producing equally robust measures to reverse this systemic failure. Forcing the Commission down the road of tackling this imbalance must now be a top priority.”
