European farmers dumping milk

European dairy producers are dumping milk to protest low prices. More than 60,000 producers in Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy reduced or halted milk deliveries on Friday. Belgian farmers sprayed about 3 million liters (790,000 gallons) of their milk on fields on Wednesday. Last weekend, German farmers dumped 7,000 liters of milk in front of the Ag Ministry in Bonn and an estimated 40 percent of France’s 90,000 dairy farmers took part in a protest.

Deutche-Welle reports Belgian, Dutch and German farmers tried to prevent trucks from entering distribution and storage sites, and have tried to win public support by giving milk away for free.

The dairy farmers blame over-production and low prices on a failure of the EU’s milk quota system.  As part of an overall plan to reform the E.U. common agriculture policy, EU agriculture ministers previously agreed to raise the milk production quotas by one percent per year before scrapping them altogether in 2015. Protest leaders say those increases led to overproduction, they wanted a freeze on production and a pan-European institution to regulate the supply and demand of milk.

Apparently the only EU country not experiencing protests is Spain, where the leading farm unions have called off protests after signing an agreement on July 20 with the government and wholesalers to use collective agreements to buy milk at indexed prices.