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Rising Meat and Falling Raw Milk Prices…
The milk and meat sectors are in close interaction with each other in cattle breeding. Failure of the dairy sector to make money causes first a milk crisis and then a meat crisis and Türkiye has experienced this many times in the past.
Raw milk that does not make money causes cows to be slaughtered, and slaughtered cows lead to the inability to meet the need for male calves, thus dragging the meat crisis behind it, just as we are experiencing with the current hike in meat prices.
Even at the price announced by the National Milk Council (USK) as 17.15 TL, small farmers in many parts of Anatolia cannot sell their milk and as a result of this loss, they send their cows to slaughter because they cannot meet the cost of feed. The fact that meat prices continue to rise while so many cows are being slaughtered is actually an indication of how critical our male fattening calves have fallen. If you cannot sustain the raw milk producers in cattle breeding, it becomes impossible and unsustainable to regulate the meat sector even with imports.
The most important problem of the raw milk sector at the moment is the low demand for milk and dairy products as well as the determination and announcement of the correct raw milk cost and sales price. The low purchasing power has led to a decline in domestic demand and the horizontal course of exchange rates for a long time has reduced our export chances and consequently led to an increase in stocks.
In fact, it was clear months ago that this would be the case and although the sector representatives warned many times, unfortunately, we have come to these days because sufficient measures were not taken. The measures we wanted to be taken were as follows: export support for milk and dairy products in return for the raw milk used, re-implementation of the school milk project, support for the production and export of milk powder, providing cheap financing support to milk buyers, increasing milk supports (premiums) and paying them monthly.
Today, the only one of these measures was to give a quota for milk purchase to Milk and Meat Board (ESK) to make milk powder, but this was insufficient to regulate the market. Having a type contract between the producer and the industrialist in raw milk trade, supervised by the Ministry, and penalising those who do not comply with it has not been a solution to this crisis. On the contrary, by directing the industrialists who buy milk to the unions and cooperatives that collect milk and make contracts as they wish, they have caused the price of our farmers to drop to 11-12 TL in some regions of Anatolia and the payment terms to surge up to 90 days.
On the other hand, the purchase price and conditions in the milk markets are determined by about five companies that process most of the raw milk produced and other small companies follow the milk purchase policies of these leading large companies and thus are applied throughout the country. It should be shown to both industrialists and some unions and co-operatives in the raw milk sector that milk markets are ‘bigger than 5’…
By Mutlu Doğru,
Chair of Adana Farmers Association
