Brussels, 03/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) set out a “roadmap” on Wednesday 2 March “to exit the milk crisis”.
A delegation representing farmers from France, Portugal, Spain and Belgium met the members of the private office of European Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan in Brussels on Wednesday 2 March. The commissioner's team, however, did not give an appearance of being keen on the ideas put forward by ECVC.
Among the short-term measures suggested by ECVC was an increase in the intervention price for dairy products (butter and powdered milk), a measure that is proving divisive among the member states and one that is not favoured by the Commission. ECVC stresses that the rise in the intervention price must be accompanied by compulsory regulation of production levels to prevent some farmers producing more.
More active milk market observatory. In the longer term, ECVC called for the role of the European milk market observatory to be strengthened so that it can calculate production costs and the volumes of milk collected by dairies, and discover what the dairies do with the milk (cheese, yoghurt, powdered milk, etc.), Gwenaëlle Martin of the Fédération unie de groupements d'éleveurs et d'agriculteurs, Belgium, told EUROPE. The idea would also be for the observatory to be more active and for it to serve as a warning and prevention system in the event of a drop in milk prices. The Commission would seem to have been amenable to the suggestions advanced to make the observatory a more effective instrument.
Pooling of risk. ECVC suggests, too, a “price tunnel” with a threshold below which prices will not be allowed to fall and a ceiling, which takes account of global demand. If prices were to fall to the minimum set, a system compulsorily reducing production would be triggered. This system would not cost anything as it would be self-financing, a source said, speaking, in other words, of a “counter-cyclical risk-pooling system”. The Commission did not, apparently, show any great enthusiasm for this system, arguing, for instance, that milk producers already receive aid from the common agricultural policy (CAP). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)