Without a rise in the price of milk to drink at the beginning of the school year, the dairy industry does not refrain from moving “towards union destruction,” warned the dairy farmers’ union that met on Friday afternoon with the Minister of Agriculture. “The minister told us that he understood our demands,” commented Thierry Roquefeuil, president of the National Federation of Milk Producers at the end of his meeting with Marc Fesneau.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, at the end of February, the sector has noticed a stagnation in the price of milk paid to producers in France, while it is rising in the rest of European countries. “Milk producers should have charged 445.5 euros per tonne of milk in June, while in France the average was around 425 euros,” explained the FNPL president.
“We do not prohibit a national action”
The FNPL is upset to see that the increases in production costs for milk producers are not transferred to France “while we have the same costs as our German neighbors,” said Yohann Barbe, treasurer of the FNPL during a press conference. Thursday. Faced with the difficulty that manufacturers encounter in getting price increases to distributors, “we do not prohibit national action,” declared Daniel Perrin, general secretary of the FNPL, “and if we have to reach union destruction, we will don’t ban it.”
“In hard-discount we would be 78 cents compared to 99 cents in Germany for a carton of semi-skimmed milk,” cites as an example Ghislain de Viron, first vice president of the union, who wants to see a liter of bottled milk approaching one euro in the shelves at the beginning of the school year. Dairy farmers are giving distributors until September 1 “to catch up to the European level” so that “in October the money reaches the breeders,” said Thierry Roquefeuil.
It is “letting it go” that there will be a risk of shortages, even if “it doesn’t happen tomorrow” since it is a long-term sector, explained Yohann Barbe, treasurer of the FNPL. “It takes three years for a calf to produce and if we lose dairy cows, then it takes three years to get them back,” he added. Global warming and sharp increases in production costs threaten the sustainability of herds in France at a time when the dairy industry is facing a problem of generational change.
Source: BFM TV
