Andrew Martin has been wonderful about providing in depth stories on farming to the New York Times. This one is no exception.
As Recession Deepens, So Does Milk Surplus
This diary is not a criticism of the article but to point out that part of the story of milk was told.
Given the economy and the raids going on across the country against non-corporate raw milk dairy farmers, http://www.counterpunch.org/... and non-corporate milk being literally criminalized,
it would make a more complete story on dairy farming in the US - as well as an exceptionally interesting piece - to see those raids put into the context of the industrial milk industry. ALL of our dairy farmers are in trouble but in different ways.
Martin's story is describing the industrial side and gives a window into the whole mess of the globalization of milk. The story is of glut and large swings in the market and farmers being knocked around in it all. And while they are not mentioned, in the background, the impact of Monsanto's monopoly over grains is part of the problem for industrial dairy farmers given the increase is the price of feed.
Raw milk dairy farmers exist within a completely different set of economies, involving grass-fed cows and milk sold only locally, avoiding any corporate middleman, export issues, or the drastically rising cost of inputs for GE-corn and GE-soy.
Meanwhile, at a local level (the level everyone says is critical to food security and important for stopping global warming because of the high demand for oil in pesticides, industrial equipment and distant transport ), there is growing demand for raw milk and there is actual safety for the farmer within a local economy (as well as for the consumer), ESPECIALLY during hard times.
"The bags of milk powder represent a startling reversal of fortune for the dairy industry, which flourished in recent years in part because of a growing appetite for milk, cheese, ice cream and pizza in places like Mexico, Egypt and Indonesia." ...
"Much of the increase was caused by increased demand in developing countries, where a growing middle class replaced starch in their diets with protein sources like meat and dairy products. Some Asian countries had little history of eating dairy products but were introduced to milk and mild cheeses by government nutrition programs or by restaurant chains like McDonald's and Pizza Hut."
Was our government responsible for getting milk introduced into those nutrition programs as part of "free" trade agreements?
"In China, for instance, per-person dairy consumption nearly doubled in just five years, to 63 pounds in 2007 from 33 pounds in 2002 (though it remains far below the per-capita consumption in the United States of about 580 pounds), according to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. The growth translates into the need for nearly 40 billion pounds more milk each year, roughly equal to California's annual milk production.
"In addition to the increased demand, exports from the American dairy industry benefited from a relatively weak dollar and tight global supplies. For instance, droughts reduced milk production in New Zealand and Australia, two major dairy exporters, allowing American suppliers to fill the gaps.
"American dairy shipments soared to places like Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. The biggest market, however, was Mexico, where imports from America increased to $853 million in 2007 from $258 million in 2003, according to the Agriculture Department."
The EU isn't listed.
Is it still the case that the EU won't touch our milk products because of rBGH despite Bill Clinton leaning on them heavily to do so? http://www.newropeans-magazine.org/...
Mr. Martin didn't mention rBGH though it is Monsanto's legacy (they recently sold it to Eli Lilly) to the glut of milk.
Ironically, given the glut, the following announcement was made by Elanco (a division of Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY) of its purchase of rBGH (or Posilac):
"Global dairy demand is increasing, outstripping supply, and consumers are seeing rapidly rising prices," said Jeff Simmons, president, Elanco. "With the purchase of Posilac, Elanco can enhance its overall product portfolio and work together with the industry to provide dairy farmers more options and give consumers affordable choices. Critically, we remain focused on the health and care of the cow in working with farmers to increase global milk supply."
http://current.com/...
What is going on?
Is global demand for milk actually outstripping supply? If so, why is milk sitting in warehouses here, and our farmers being given nothing for their milk? Why are consumers seeing rapidly rising prices if milk is piled up in warehouses? And if there is demand, why haven't prices paid to farmers gone up?
I heard here, on Dailykos, from a farmer whose neighbors run a large dairy and said he was closing down because he has not made any more than he did back in 1970. A quarter of a century ago.
While with huge resistance against rBGH-milk here in the US based on health concerns that were flagged even before its release as the first genetically engineered product approved by the FDA - including its link to breast cancers - are we exporting diseases to countries which have previously had low levels of breast cancer? How much are corporate advertising and fast food multinationals responsible for the "demand" for milk and ice cream and cheeses in countries that didn't have a demand for dairy in the past? What has any of this done to health in these countries?
Clinton also pushed but failed to get Codex to set a standard to allow for rBGH.
"By refusing to set a standard today, Codex has recognized that there is no consensus on rbGH safety in the international scientific community, and that national governments should be able to decide whether rbGH should be permitted in their milk supply," said Jean Halloran, Director of the Consumer Policy Institute at Consumers Union.
The U.S. has pushed Codex to adopt a standard to ensure the continued export of its dairy products from cows treated with the rbGH drug. However, U.S.-driven efforts to persuade the international community that rbGH is safe have been blocked twice before at Codex, in 1995 and again in 1997, primarily by opposition from European governments.
http://www.consumersunion.org/...
Codex has refused three times to approve rBGH.
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand is also rBGH-free. The company explains this decision by saying “We think its use is a step in the wrong direction toward a synthetic, chemically-intensive, factory-produced food supply”.
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/...
Away from all the worries about rBGH and the international battles over sovereignty and the high costs of inputs for farmers using GMO-corn and GMO-soy, and prices controlled monopolistically by Monsanto, the world is very different for local raw milk farmers.
The put their cows out to pasture on grass and are managing because customers are seeking them out and paying them directly for their milk, enough for them to make a living. Instead of $1.50 a gallon, they make $6 a gallon and up, from customers they know who are happy to pay for it. During this economic meltdown, they may need to retrench a bit if customers do, or they might actually be in a good position since milk is so basic a food. But their input costs are not based on products within a corporate monopoly, since their main feed is grass, out in the pasture.
I hope Andrew Martin and others will begin doing stories on the disparities between an industrial farming system that is failing at every level and a vibrant local farming system that is protective during such times as we are going through, versus the complexity, high input, low prices and helplessness for dairy farmers in the industrial globalized system.
Martin and others in the media need to highlight farm raids and what the USDA is doing to intentionally destroy local farmers - or shall we say "sustainable agriculture"? - who pose a threat to corporate processors in not needing them, in, in fact, surviving because they are doing without them.
Obama campaigned in support of sustainable agriculture. His selection of a Monsanto's man Vilsack is a massive betrayal of those campaign promises and of our farmers who are clearly in trouble. Vilsack was dreamed up anti-democratic laws http://environmentalcommons.org/...
that remove from communities AND FARMERS the right to keep GMOs out of their area, and he supports genetic engineering of crops though it comes with patents that turn farmers into tenant farmers on their own land since they aren't allowed to collect seeds and end by only renting them, and though it uses 8-10 more petroleum-based pesticides than normal - that is, oil. It is, on an economic-level, about monopoly in farming, about increased demand for oil and about sowing global warming, seed by seed.
That is another back story to the industrial milk glut that needs telling.
The industrial morass needs to placed alongside questioning why our tax-payers dollars are going to fund USDA raids against horse and buggy Mennonite farmers - traditional local dairy farmers whose customers love them and come out to protest raids against and who hold fund raisers to try to compensate for 10s of 1000s of dollars in stolen and dumped equipment and food - farmers who are practicing EXACTLY what Obama says we must have - sustainable agriculture.
The industrial dairy farmer who has never gotten more for his milk from the processors than he did back in 1970 is the industrial story. Meanwhile we're paying taxes for the USDA to increasingly and violently attack and terrorize local farming - dairy farmers and farmers' markets It is farming that is succeeding and is critical protection for all of us during an economic meltdown. It is farming that we say we want - local and sustainable and with very little carbon foot-print. It is farming providing the dairy farmers.
My concern is that corporate agriculture is having it every which way. They are creating a glut of milk that they then use to tell industrial dairy farmers they can't pay them much, while telling customers that there is demand that can't be met and that's why prices are high. And on the non-corporate side, they control the USDA which is doing all it can to break the back of the sustainable dairy farming that the Amish and the Mennonite and others have done for generations. The USDA is making sure that the local farms and quality, organic and artisan foods the public increasingly desires is made impossible through brutal attacks.
"As for those farmers and consumers who won't behave like proper sheep, who refuse to shut up and swallow the official story: harass and threaten them, seize their animals, ruin their reputations, and destroy them financially and psychologically.
Linda and Larry Faillace, and their children, Jackie, Heather, and Francis, along with the Vermont consumer and farm activists who stood by them, are not only good shepherds, they are national heroes. USDA bureaucrats like Linda Detwiler, CDC bureaucrats like Lawrence Schonberger, indentured politicians, and their puppet masters behind the scenes‹the leaders of the corporate-industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical complex‹are the real offenders.
After campaigning in the trenches for thirteen years to get the USDA and FDA to stop the hazardous feeding of billions of pounds of blood, slaughterhouse waste, and manure every year to farm animals, and to require mandatory testing of cattle for mad cow disease at slaughter, I had lost or repressed some of my anger and frustrations. But then I read this book, and like post-combat stress, a flood of memories rushed back.
Hate mail arriving at my Washington office in 1993 along with a series of anonymous telephone death threats to my colleagues, just after we launched a national campaign against McDonald's and filed a legal petition to stop the feeding of animals to animals. A creepy ex-military intelligence agent provocateur who infiltrated our campaign and followed me around Washington, posing as a representative from the World Council of Churches. A private investigator in Wisconsin reporting that our office telephones were tapped, probably by the beef industry. A national news producer sheepishly apologizing to me for "alterations" in the script of a nationally televised ABC News story on mad cow disease that aired in 1997‹following what he described as a "call from the White House."
And more. Fruitlessly petitioning the Centers for Disease Control to make the human equivalent of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt- Jacob Disease (CJD), an officially reportable disease. Petitioning the CDC, again in vain, to require autopsies for a significant number of the 50,000 Americans who die every year from Alzheimer's disease, to determine whether they actually had CJD (CJD is often mistakenly diagnosed as Alzheimer's, because its symptoms are similar). Watching the Bush administration USDA blame the Canadians for our first mad cow cases, and shortly thereafter threaten a Kansas meat packer, Creekstone Farms, for the "crime" of wanting to test all of their cows at slaughter for Mad Cow disease.
No wonder millions of Americans no longer trust the government or the media. No wonder millions of consumers are turning away from industrial meat and food and voting with their pocketbooks for healthy, sustainable, locally produced organic foods.
But voting with our consumer dollars is not enough. The mad sheep battle described in these pages is not an isolated case. Armed with $90 billion in taxpayer money each year, the USDA is waging war against all of us‹consumers, family farmers, farm animals, and the environment. The direct and collateral damage of this war includes rampant water, air, and food pollution; an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, obesity, and hormone disruption; pollution by genetically engineered crops; an unsustainable, massive venting of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases; pesticide and antibiotic contamination; proliferation of junk food; systematic exploitation of small farmers, farm workers, and slaughterhouse workers; and the dumping of millions of tons of subsidized crops and meat at below the cost of production on developing nations, thereby destroying the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and rural communities.
It's time to follow the example of the Faillace family. It's time to stand up and fight, not only for ourselves, but also for future generations."
Ronnie Cummins, head of the Organic Consumer Association