April 3, 2007

EU commissioner calls for an end on milk quotas 
 

European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has called to end milk quotas across the EU when the bloc's dairy regime is revamped in 2015.

Fischer Boel said that there is a powerful case against the existing quota regime at a period when governments are cutting farm subsidies, lawmakers should work to push producers find their income in markets.

The former Danish farm minister said EU's quota regime stifles markets.

Fischer Boel stressed that quotas on milk are "strongly anticompetitive policy" in the light EU's Common Agricultural Policy towards competitiveness of its products on the world market.

Fischer Boel said she is pushing the change now, to the surprise of many, because of the nature of the milk industry¡ªits need for long-term planning as well as being capital intensive.

She said the dairy farmers should adapt measures to prepare them of a quota-less milk trade by April 2015.

"The dairy industry is very capital intensive, and dairy farmers are making important decisions right now. If they are going to wake up to a world without milk quotas on April 1, 2015, they need as much advance warning as possible," she explained. "They may also need transitional measures to prepare them for the change."

Fischer Boel is not the first commissioner to argue in favour of ending dairy quotas. Her predecessor made the same argument when the EU's dairy regime was last reformed in 2003.

At that point, EU member governments decided to keep the quota's through April 1, 2015.