RE: Dairy supply rules not needed, says economist by Dave Mabell

We don’t need to look too far past the American border to see how the removal of these “unneeded dairy supply rules” are impacting our American neighbours. Farmers in the USA are suffering, their federal government is heavily subsiding them so they can even survive, and there is a drastic oversupply of milk.

It’s a fallacy that milk is cheaper without supply management. According to AC Nielson (2016), milk in Canada is $1.51/litre while the USA is $1.65/litre. Despite the values being similar, don’t put your wallet away just yet if you reside in the USA.

American citizens pay again though their taxes a yearly amount of $22.2 billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies (Peter Clark, 2018) to their dairy farmers which is just shy of 75 per cent of their income. Canadian dairy farmers receive $0 in subsidies and taxpayers pay $0 to our dairy farmers. So in reality, American taxpayers are paying about — of the cost of producing that American milk, whereas our Canadian taxpayer dollars go towards schools, hospitals and roads, not to support dairy farmers.

Why is that? The USA has a real milk oversupply problem. They produce, produce, produce and they are simply looking for somewhere to dump their excess milk and we’re not interested. We produce to meet our demand in Canada so this isn’t an issue for us. It might be the one thing that the Liberal Party and the PC’s agree on: they both support supplying the market demand with Canadian dairy products. Why would we not support our 517 family farms in Alberta and the Canadian economy?

A little perspective and a lot of facts go a long way.

TOM KOOTSTRA

Alberta dairy farmer

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