Farmers are the losers

SUPERMARKETS should stand condemned for $1/litre milk.

All businesses use “leader lines”.

Every “special” advertised is a marketing ploy whereby a business lures customers in with a cheap priced item in the hope that they will buy other things once through the doors.

This is often considered a “business loss” item used as advertising.

The notion that someone other than your business or the consumer will pay for that loss item can only occur with market dominance over suppliers.

Now the supermarkets are asking us to applaud them for raising milk prices from $1 to $1.10. That is contempt.

The real losers are the farmers and the processors. Coca Cola Amatil makes more than $1 a litre for water pumped from the Ku-ring-gai Chase aquifer at little more than a peppercorn royalty.

The only users of underground water to access their product cheaper than Coca Cola are the miners who pay nothing/zip/$0.

City folk mutter platitudes of support for branded milk but ultimately sell their loyalty to the cheapest product.

Nobody who has ever had cow dung or urine flicked in their face on a rainy morning would agree that anything less than $2 per litre is a fair wage.

No city dweller would accept a pay cut of 50 per cent at the whim of the supermarkets. Unions would picket in outrage.

Farmers are price takers usually governed by supply and demand. There is usually boom and bust. Huge profits amid seasons of loss. Dairying tends to trend along a median with little boom or bust — until now.

City folk won’t care until the food is no longer there. Supermarkets are on the brink of causing the extinction of Australian dairy farmers and then prices will sky-rocket.

World population increase is about to cause the inadequate supply of ocean fish and then prices will sky-rocket.

The next food sources to fall short of world consumption will be red meat, wheat and rice in that order which will herald starvation and/or war.

Or we all learn to eat lettuce and grasshoppers. John Robertson, White Rock