The Price of Milk

I had a letter this morning from the very large organisation that employs my milkman saying that the price of milk is going up. Amongst the usual platitudinous CRM-based nonsense was this paragraph:

"The main reason for this increase is a world shortage of milk, which is affecting the price of all milk and dairy products. This comes at a time when the British dairy industry is also experiencing significant change. The soaring cost of animal feed and poor weather over the summer has led to lower amounts of milk being produced and some real difficulties for many of our farmers."

Oh come off it. I'm no investigative journalist, and I don't have the time to present a watertight case here, but this smells of something else to me. It's been several years since we first started hearing that UK dairy farmers were going out of business at an alarming rate due to the aggressive purchasing tactics of the major retailers. More recently we've heard the allegations of price-fixing of milk and cheese. And now we're short of milk, and it's going to cost us more money.

Did no-one else see this coming? I predict that it's time to start looking very hard at our budgets and what we consider important. I have a feeling that our current fixation with cheap commodities is going to prove itself unsustainable and consumers are going to get a good hard bite in the arse in the next few years. Milk is only the start.