Provisional figures, published on Thursday 16 March, for the scheme put in place by the European Commission in the summer of 2016 to reduce milk production in the EU show that 43,968 farmers have voluntarily reduced their production by 851,700 tonnes between October and December 2016.
With its €150 million budget, this is one of the flagship measures put in place by the Commission to tackle the crisis in the milk sector.
It has contributed to the trend of rising EU milk prices seen over the last few months, balancing the markets, the Commission says.
Any unused money from the €150 million will remain available for agricultural expenditure and will finance other market measures that may prove necessary in the agricultural sector.
The figures for the second and final reduction period (November 2016 to January 2017) will only be known at the beginning of April.
In all, more than €1 billion has been mobilised since September 2015 in the form of market measures like public intervention and private storage for dairy products and financial support for member states.
“The European Union continues to strongly support dairy farmers in good times and bad. When I took office in 2014, Europe was entering a profound and lasting dairy price crisis. We saw the storm clouds coming. And we took decisive action at every stage of the crisis, exhausting every legislative tool at our disposal”, Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan told the General Assembly of the French federation of milk producers (FNPL) in Langres on Thursday.
“The voluntary reduction production scheme is a measure which had never been done before, but which has been a clear success. There has been a slow but unmistakeable price recovery, with the milk market witnessing a rising trend for a number of months. EU average farm gate milk prices have increased by 31% since last summer, up to 33.7 c/kg in February. Is this a perfect recovery? Of course not. But is it evidence that things are moving in the right direction? I would say yes”, he said. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)