Why are milk prices plummeting?
Dairy farmers are in deep trouble. Milk prices have fallen by half since last year, dropping to a 30-year low. Consumption has fallen in light of the slowing world economy and now there is a huge milk surplus, or so the “experts” tell us. It’s a nice theory: surplus equals low prices. Easy to explain and easily accepted by farmers. Farmers want an explanation, they listen to the dairy “experts.” They drink the Kool-Aid. Milk prices, like the rest of the world economy, crashed because of a globalized, unregulated free market system, not because of surplus product. According to New York dairy farmer/market analyst John Bunting “dairy markets are run by an oligarchy—a few elite players—with little or no government oversight”. The parallels between the current dairy price crash and the Wall Street financial crash are pointedly exact. Both crashes were engineered by the same sort of folks, those who promised us they had the Midas Touch but were, instead, bulls in the china shop. Just as Wal
