Title: Why are milk prices plummeting? | Grist
Headings: Why are milk prices plummeting?
Why are milk prices plummeting?
Support climate news that matters
Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu?

Content: Milk prices, like the rest of the world economy, crashed because of a globalized, unregulated free market system, not because of surplus product. According to New York dairy farmer/market analyst John Bunting “dairy markets are run by an oligarchy — a few elite players — with little or no government oversight”. The parallels between the current dairy price crash and the Wall Street financial crash are pointedly exact. Both crashes were engineered by the same sort of folks, those who promised us they had the Midas Touch but were, instead, bulls in the china shop. Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one. Just as Wall Street investment bankers took advantage of the removal of regulatory safeguards put in place by the government after the 1930’s depression, so did the “elite players” of the dairy industry take advantage when the US Congress scraped parity dairy pricing in 1981. Until 1981 as Bunting shows, farm and consumer milk prices were perfectly correlated. Since 1981 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) inflation adjusted farm prices have steadily fallen while consumer prices have steadily risen. Increased 2009 first quarter earnings of Kraft Foods (up 29%) and Dean Foods (up 39%) came, according to The Milkweed, “from dairy farmers’ grief”.