Milk sector at forefront of demands for action

Pressure is mounting for the UK government to come up with a package of measures which are better suited to helping the farming sector weather the Covid-19 storm.

At a meeting with UK Environment Secretary, George Eustice, before the bank holiday weekend, representatives from the UK’S farming unions pressed home the problems currently being faced by the sector.

At the specially convened meeting, English NFU president Minette Batters spelled out in no uncertain terms that many of the measures which the Treasury had made available to businesses simply weren’t relevant to agriculture.

Citing milk producers, where a slump in demand due to the loss of the hospitality and service sectors coupled with a rationing on retail sales was seeing uncollected milk poured down drains, she said: “A key issue is that dairy farmers or processors largely cannot access the Treasury schemes designed to help businesses through this crisis. We cannot furlough staff or stop milking cows, and things like business rate holidays don’t apply to us.

“We need Defra and the Treasury to work together to extend these schemes so that they can be utilised by everyone in the dairy sector,” she told Eustice.

Batters said that the union had been flagging the problems of the dairy sector for weeks and working with Defra to try to find a solution: “We believe there may be at least 2,000 dairy farmers suffering severe financial pressure and that number is growing by the day as a result of the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak and as things develop very few dairy businesses will be left unaffected. We need to move fast to mitigate the impacts of this unfolding crisis on dairy farming businesses across the country.”

She told the secretary that urgent action was therefore required – as it was important to everyone that the UK dairy sector was protected so that when normality returned there was still a dairy industry to produce the milk which would be needed.

And Scotland’s rural economy secretary, Fergus Ewing, added his backing to a call for measures for the farming sector. In a letter to the Environment Secretary, he also highlighted the impact being felt in the dairy sector and stressed the problems of achieving carcase balance in the beef and sheep sectors which had seen prices fall to potentially unsustainable levels.

“Similar difficulties are of course being experienced across all agricultural sectors, affecting both processors and primary producers, who I must commend for rising to the occasion so far to keep our nations supplied at this time whilst adhering to the tight guidelines required to operate and protect staff if a safe manner,” added Ewing.

Meanwhile NFU Scotland milk committee chairman Gary Mitchell claimed that his sector was facing the “perfect storm” of bad news for the industry, with the closure of cafes and restaurants striking just as just as the sector was coming into the spring flush:

“And that is why we have contacted retailers to ask them to lift any limit on what individual shoppers can buy.”