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Title: Germany Faces Dairy Shortages as Farmers' Protests Escalate
Source:
Spiegel
URL Source: [None]
Published: Jun 3, 2008
Author: staff
Post Date: 2008-06-03 22:32:14 by DeaconBenjamin
Keywords: None
Views: 57
Comments: 3
Germany's supermarkets are facing imminent shortages of dairy products as farmers blockade dairies and refuse to sell them milk. Farmers insist they will keep up their protests until retailers agree to pay higher prices. The refrigerators in Germany's supermarkets could soon be looking very bare. Germany is facing an imminent shortage of milk and other dairy products as bitter protests by the country's farmers start to take their toll. Dairy farmers angry over low milk prices have been protesting across Germany since Tuesday of last week. Farmers have stopped supplies to dairies and have blockaded dairies across Germany with tractors and other vehicles. Over 20 of Germany's 100 main dairies were blockaded as of Monday, and police have been called in to break up some of the protests. Furious farmers have been feeding milk to their cows, spreading it on fields as fertilizer or pouring it onto streets in protest. Germany's large dairies admitted Tuesday that milk supplies were getting tight. "There are delivery bottlenecks and they are increasing by the hour," Eckhard Heuser, managing director of the Association of the German Dairy Industry (MIV), told the Financial Times Deutschland. MIV represents large milk processing companies, which are dependent on farmers for their deliveries and which have been suffering over the last few days due to the farmers' strike. Management at Ehrmann, a large dairy, told the mass circulation newspaper Bild that it will have to halt production on Tuesday if the blockade of its two plants continues. The first retail chains are starting to complain about supply shortages, and consumers are expected to feel the pinch by Wednesday at the latest. According to MIV, over the last few days farmers have delivered less than half the normal amount of milk. Deliveries of unpasteurized milk to processors have also been affected, meaning that supplies of fresh milk, cheese and the popular German soft cheese quark have been disrupted. No End in Sight The situation is made more difficult for German retailers because it is hard for them to import milk from other European countries. The so-called spot market for milk, where suppliers can sell surpluses for immediate delivery, is relatively small in Europe and stocks are currently low. The protests have also spread beyond Germany's borders. At the end of last week, 500 farmers blockaded a dairy in Strasbourg in France, while Belgian farmers supported their German colleagues at a blockade in the Eifel region on the German-Belgian border. Other protests have taken place in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Latvia. Graphic: Falling milk prices in Germany There is currently no end in sight to the strike, with talks between farmers' representatives and industry so far failing to bear fruit. The first round of talks took place Sunday and a second round was planned for Tuesday. However there were signs Tuesday that some protests were starting to ease, with the German news agency DPA reporting that farmers in the state of Lower Saxony had given up their blockades during Monday night. Farmers have also received support from the government. Agriculture ministers from Germany's 16 federal states and the federal agriculture minister, Horst Seehofer, spoke out Monday in favor of farmers' demands for higher milk prices. "Fair, cost-covering prices are necessary," said Saxony's state agricultural minister, Roland Wöller, who spoke on behalf of the state ministers. Erwin Huber, head of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, also sided with the dairy farmers, saying that "quality has its price." Huber, whose state is home to many dairy farmers, visited Bavarian farmers for a photo-op Monday. German supermarket giants Rewe and Aldi have also stated they were ready to discuss existing contracts with dairy farmers. Rewe spokesman Wolfram Schmuck told the Associated Press that the company hoped to "find a solution that would lead to fair prices for farmers and consumers." Going to Court Meanwhile, dairies are threatening to take legal action against the farmers. "The boycotts are illegal, and one has to fight illegal actions using the law," MIV head Eberhard Hetzner told the regional newspaper Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Industry experts are expecting a wave of legal action to follow the protests. Supply contracts exist between the dairies and retailers as well as between farmers and the dairies. Many of these contracts have been broken during the current protests, making a flood of compensation claims inevitable. And dairy farmers could face trouble from another quarter. Germany's antitrust body, the Federal Cartel Office, is examining whether calls by the German Federal Dairy Farmers Association (BDM) for farmers to stop deliveries counts as a call to boycott, spokeswoman Silke Kaul told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. A call to boycott is illegal under German competition law. If suspicions were confirmed, the association could face fines running as high as millions of euros. Thirst for Milk Germany has around 100,000 dairy farmers, of whom around 33,000 are members of the BDM. However, those farmers supply around half of Germany's milk. "Milk is power, and we have the milk," BDM head Romuald Schaber told a rally of dairy farmers last week. Farmers claim they are being exploited by large supermarket chains, who are allegedly using their market dominance to force prices down. Farmers are demanding a price of €0.43 ($0.67) per liter for their milk. Currently they are receiving between €0.27 and €0.35 per liter, depending on the region of Germany. A recent surplus of milk had pushed prices down in Germany. Spring is generally a period of milk surpluses and European Union milk production quotas were also raised in April in a bid to bring down the then-high milk prices. In late April, German dairy farmers reacted furiously (more...) to the decision by leading German supermarket chains Lidl, Aldi and Rewe to reduce the price of milk from €0.73 to €0.61 per liter. The large German retail chains reportedly pressured dairies to cut their prices if they wanted to continue to supply the same quantities of milk. Farmers' representatives began to threaten to stop delivering milk after the supermarkets announced their price cuts. The current low prices are a far cry from last autumn, when milk prices skyrocketed. The supposed growing thirst for milk in China, which at the time was widely cited as a reason for the price hikes, actually had little to do with the increases, which were caused more by nervousness in the dairy industry in Germany as a result of milk shortages in the US. Deals were hectically made, causing prices to rise. The overheated milk market in 2007, with its exaggerated prices, has been compared to the New Economy at the end of the 1990s, when Internet hysteria artificially drove up stock prices for "dot com" companies. Farmers have now been hit by a market correction. Still, German farmers are likely to take heart from the example of their colleagues in Switzerland, whose boycott has ended in victory. Farmers' representatives reached a deal with dairies in the early hours of Tuesday morning, winning a price increase of almost 4 euro cents per kilo, guaranteed for six months as of July.
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#1. To: DeaconBenjamin, *Agriculture-Environment* (#0)
Ping. We may soon all need to return to or at least become more respectful of bygone agricultural dominant times. As you said, lodi: "There's just something honest and good about living close to the land, with God's creatures, doing what they're meant to do with, and for us."
We may well agree, but as a whole, the nation is so far removed from the land, they'd never get up to speed in enough time to do anything. Truth is, most would go out and shoot the cow and have a BBQ without realizing that it is because of HER that they could have food on their table year after year after year. The majority of the nation would be so gung ho in 'getting for their own' that they'd be killing, robbing, and stealing to get immediate needs satisfied. A nation that believes it is all about 'themselves and their wants, needs, and desires' ain't about to take up gardening to feed their own faces. Furthermore, if fedgov things they can stop 300 million people from reverting to jungle mentality just because they can take over food stores or utilities or whatnot, just have extra popcorn and beer or coke or coffee or whatever on hand, because riots of Detroit and Watts I and II were merely a drop in the bucket of what could be expected.
Turn your back on the sun and you only see the shadows.
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
James Madison
#2. To: lodwick, rowdee (#0)
(Edited)
#3. To: scrapper2 (#2)
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