ICMSA call for EU-wide voluntary milk supply reduction scheme to prevent farmer ‘wipeout’
Global supplies are currently up 2.3% between January-November 2025 compared to a deficit of 0.1% within the same period in 2024.
A call for an EU-wide voluntary milk supply reduction scheme has been made by the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA).
ICMSA president Denis Drennan has called for the scheme in the hopes it will reduce supply coming into the markets in a way that has been proven to “put a floor under” the falling farmer milk price.
Mr Drennan said such a voluntary scheme was a "tried and tested" method that had previously worked in very similar circumstances and would provide badly needed support for farmers in Ireland and right across the EU as they face into the critical late-spring or early summer peak production period.
Global supplies are currently up 2.3% between January-November 2025 compared to a deficit of 0.1% within the same period in 2024, highlighting the current oversupply on the global market.
Mr Drennan said:
"No one else in the dairy sector, whether personally or as a business, is taking the kind of financial ‘hit’ that results from a milk price falling from over 50 cents per litre to below 33 cents per litre in some cases.
"No-one or no other part of the sector is losing so much as a cent; it’s the farmer who’s taking the ‘hit’ for the whole sector, with everyone else using the farmer’s ‘wipeout’ as the equivalent of a reset button for the whole sector.
"Everyone along the supply chain benefits from a market upturn, but only the farmer suffers from a market downturn. It’s so obvious, and it must be addressed.”
Mr Drennan said the EU Commission and the Irish Government “were never done” preaching about the need for sustainability at the farm level.
To deliver sustainable prices, global milk supplies need to come down, and the EU had the mechanism to ensure that that happened.
“The over-supply is global, but the EU can — and should — be fixing what’s within its own power to fix; it should be doing what it can do ‘inside its own gate’.
"In 2016, the EU introduced an EU-wide Voluntary Reduction Scheme, which provided a payment to individual farmers to voluntarily cut their milk supplies for a specified period.
"The scheme worked almost immediately by changing market sentiment and, critically, it provided dairy farmers with an option of either producing more, the same, or less milk in a market downturn,” said Mr Drennan.
The ICMSA president said the proposal would “doubtless” be opposed by some elements.
But those objecting were obliged to propose their own solutions, and “just waiting around” for the market to turn up of its own accord was going to inflict massive and possibly irreversible damage on the most valuable sector of Irish agri-exports.
“The EMB (European Milk Board) is strongly advocating this solution to what is rapidly becoming a market collapse and the Irish Government should throw its full weight behind an easy and affordable solution that will restore market balance in a speedy and transparent way,” concluded Mr Drennan.
