It will soon be time for the milk marketing boards to make their routine pitch for price increases for industrial and fluid milk, so it's hardly surprising that the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CFRA) has launched a public-relations campaign about milk pricing.
It is using its website to create a petition to urge governments to take action on milk pricing. They also get a chance to air their views about the issue.
The CFRA hired the Innovative Research Group to conduct a survey which found - surprise! surprise! - that the public would like prices to come down for milk and dairy products.
He noted that Statistics Canada reports that Canadians are consuming 18 per cent less milk than they did 20 years ago.
Since 1994 the price of milk used to make cheese and yogurt has climbed by 58.5 per cent while the consumer price index has risen by only 34.2 per cent. That, I note, is a quite different situation from the boasts that former agriculture minister Eugene Whelan made about pricing for supply-managed commodities lagging inflation.
Based on figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), today Canadians pay roughly double the world average for milk and 63 per cent more than Americans, says the CFRA. That, of course, leads to a lot of cross-border shopping which robs Canadian producers, processors and retailers of sales and profits.
The CFRA says "Canada's dairy supply management system is costing Canadians approximately $2.4 billion every year."
It would be one thing if this money flowed into the bank accounts of dairy farmers, but I think the real beneficiaries have been the lenders who have doled out billions to dairy farmers who want to buy quota. Of course, it's a dairy farmer's free choice to either bank the profits from supply management or use them to leverage more debt.
"We believe the Canadian dairy industry can be among the best in the world if we can find a way to increase consumption of affordable dairy products across the country," says Whyte. "CRFA is interested in working with federal and provincial governments and the dairy industry to see a fair and transparent system that benefits everyone."
The online survey was conducted during a week at the end of January involving 1,316 Canadians, 18 years of age or older.
