Ireland has been shipping over 200,000 gallons of milk, (approximately 35 bulk milk tanker loads ) to England everyday for the past couple of months, because British milk production is 15 per cent below quota this year.
This is in line with a trend in Britain where milk production has been dropping steadily over the past decade or more, with recent reports indicating that production levels are currently at the same level as they were over twenty-five years ago.
And on a related issue I see that it has been calculated that Irish dairy farmers will have to pay over €11 million because they exceeded the milk quota during the 2007/08 marketing year.
It seems that Ireland has been one of the seven EU states that has exceeded its milk quota, but the vast majority have not produced the amount of milk that they have been allocated. This has resulted in the fact that the milk quota for Europe has not been reached, and still Irish farmers will have to pay the levy for exceeding the Irish quota.
All the farm organisations, and in particular the ICMSA have voiced their opposition to this rather stupid situation in the past, but without little success to date. They want milk quota in Europe to be taken as a whole, with no fines on any country if they over-produce, as long as the total is not exceeded.
This would appear very sensible, particularly when it has been revealed that Britain for example will be under-filling their milk quota by a massive 768,000 tonnes this year. France and Poland are also very much under quota, each with a figure of over 300,000 tonnes, and at the same time we in Ireland are being fined.
It would also seem much more sensible to have the milk production year ending on December 31st each year, and not at the end of March as has always been the case since the quotas were introduced many years ago. There is little logic in dairy farmers, who are afraid of going over quota, trying to stop cows producing milk when they are in full flow during February following calving.
Only time will tell if the above suggestions will be implemented in the not too distant future, before quotas are abolished anyway.
