Bigger picture as vital as milk prices

Since I was elected president of ICMSA three years ago, I have consistently voiced my conviction that a ‘bigger picture’ effects farm incomes to at least the same degree as product prices and that we must concentrate more on ensuring that the context —the ‘bigger picture’ — within which we farm and produce food is balanced and does not, as often seems the case, discriminate against the farmers as price-takers.

The Milk Market Observatory within the Commission’s DG Agriculture to monitor the market situation for dairy products is in place over 12 months. On its launch I warned that this must not become another ineffective cop-out but that it exactly what it has become: a statistical collecting exercise, and that’s what it will stay unless given real teeth. We have all seen the damage the multiple retailers in Ireland have done to the liquid milk market and this problem is being replicated across Europe in the dairy and other sectors. Politicians across the EU — including our own — have spoken on this topic for years and all it has amounted to is a hill of utter waffle. The large multiples continue to build more stores, gain market share by whatever means, and the other links in the chain continue to pay for this excessive power. It is killing farmers and also, I believe, impacting negatively at processor level and, most certainly, the consumer is not gaining. The already too powerful are getting more power and it is at the expense of all others — whether farmers, consumers or smaller local retailers. It’s time somebody stood up to the retail giants and that has to be, it can only be, the EU Commission.

While I’m on the subject of toothless agencies, I’d like to mention our own Competition and Consumer Protection Commission —the artist formerly known as the Competition Authority — whose intervention last November in the beef dispute I described as “brass-necked”.