Committee of the Regions: Commission emergency package won't resolve milk crisis

The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) has claimed that the European Commission has waited for the milk situation to become untenable for producers before announcing emergency measures. The new package, it argues, will still not tackle structural problems in the EU's deregulated dairy sector.    

In April 2015 the CoR – the EU's assembly of local and regional authorities - had adopted its position on the future of the dairy sector warning the European authorities that the market was deteriorating. The Commission, however, continued to insist the market would remain favourable in the short to medium term and that the abolition of quotas would not be problematic. CoR President Markku Markkula said: "The Commission must introduce measures to safeguard producers' incomes and examine the Market Responsibility Programme put forward by the European Milk Board which should be applied when the milk market is threatened by imbalance".

René Souchon, President of the Auvergne Region in France who led the CoRs' opinion, believes the Commission has failed to grasp the full extent of the problem since it offers only a one-off aid measure which will not deliver a medium or long term solution. The CoR is therefore asking the EU's agriculture ministers to place pressure on the Commission during the Agriculture Council meeting on 15 September to complement the emergency measures with a series of measures of a more structural nature.

The CoR, for its part, had made the following recommendations:
>      Raising the level of the safety net for a limited period in order to cope with the looming crisis, pending the implementation of another mechanism;
>      strengthening the role of producers' organisations so that they play a clear economic role in managing prices and supply and improving the effectiveness of the contract system by making it available to the whole sector and including large-scale retailers in particular;
>      improving the operation of the European Milk Market Observatory and providing the necessary resources for this observatory to become a genuine steering mechanism, and not just a tool for post hoc observation. To this end, it is vital for the observatory to produce real-time data on a sub-Member-State scale, to take account of the diversity in circumstances between the European regions, and;
>      taking urgent measures to safeguard the income of all dairy producers, along the lines of the proposals of the European Milk Board.

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