Thousands of farmers are heading toward Brussels before a meeting next week of European ministers set to discuss plunging prices for milk, meat, fruit and vegetables.
About 4,000 farmers will gather along with hundreds of tractors on Monday as ministers debate potential agriculture support measures, said Pekka Pesonen, secretary general of Brussels-based farm lobby Copa-Cogeca. A Russian ban on many European Union food exports, slowing demand from China and oversupply of milk and pork products mean many farmers are losing money and may go out of business, he said.
European milk prices have fallen about 20 per cent in the past year, industry data show, sparking farmer protests this summer from the U.K. to Lithuania. French farmers blockaded parts of Paris on Thursday, and trading on the country’s benchmark pig market in Brittany was disrupted last month when buyers and sellers couldn’t agree on prices.
"We need European institutions to come up with a plan to immediately alleviate the problems that we face," Pesonen said by phone Friday. "This is about true concerns that farmers are having about their economic survival.”
Ministers may discuss bringing forward the timeframe that farmers receive direct payments from the EU, with support checks potentially paid out this autumn instead of in December, according to documents released by the European Council before the meeting. Prices paid for dairy products for EU stockpiles also could be raised and new measures for promoting European food products may be discussed.
Extra EU support for dairy farmers probably won’t be enough to stem falling prices as the world is oversupplied, said Robbie Turner, head of European markets at Rice Dairy International, a brokerage with offices in Chicago and London. Global production of milk, cheese and butter are all expected to climb to records this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"There’s a huge amount of pressure at the moment and it’s been very noisy," Turner said in an interview Wednesday in London. "But the reality is, this is a long-term problem that a short-term fix won’t address. The fundamentals at the moment are that there is more milk supply than there is demand."
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