| Dairy farmers show mixed emotions toward supply management issues |
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Meanwhile, the supply management drumbeat continues. Rob Vandenheuval, general manager of California’s Milk Producers Council’s (MPC), said in Friday’s broadcast that he is traveling around the country, explaining legislation that has already been introduced on Capitol Hill to deal with dairy’s financial crisis.
Referred to as the Dairy Price Stabilization Act, the MPC has actively supported the concept that would, as Vandenheuval put it, “try to align future growth in milk production with future growth in demand for milk.” He said it fits nicely with some of the other proposals being talked about, like National Milk’s which, he said, is much broader and includes a “basket of concepts.” The House bill MPC supports is HR5288, and the Senate version is S3531.
Some believe the Midwest is balking at supply management, while the West is in favor of it, but it was not that long ago that the West was opposed and the Midwest had support for it.
Vandenheuval responded, saying that in the past, supply management conjured up the idea of a Canadian style quota system and, while there may have been some interest in that in the past, there’s never been enough broad support for it to make it happen.
The last couple of years have seen the development of ideas such as the Dairy Price Stabilization Act or the Marginal Milk Pricing idea, which he said, have been popular in other parts of the country, where “we get the same benefits of a supply management program, without having the downside of a quota system.”
“We found a way to allow continued growth, which we need in this industry,” Vandenheuval said, “But do a better job of aligning that growth with demand.”
He admitted the Midwest is a high growth area right now and will be for the next decade so, “We have structured a plan that all parts of the country can be comfortable with. They can do the growing that they need to do, while at the same time insure that not all 65,000 dairymen are growing at the same time and create the chronic surpluses that we’ve seen over the last 10 to 20 years.”
The CWT program announced export assistance bids from Foremost Farms, Darigold, and Dairy Farmers of America this week on 892,872 pounds of Cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese to the Middle East and Asia. The product will be delivered July through October, 2010 and moves CWT’s export total to 38.9 million pounds.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a draft guidance intended to “help reduce the development of resistance to medically important antimicrobial drugs used in food-producing animals.” The draft outlines the FDA’s current thinking on strategies to assure that antimicrobial drugs that are important for therapeutic use in humans are “used judiciously in animal agriculture,” according to an FDA press release.
National Milk’s vice president of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs, Jamie Jonker, pointed out in Thursday’s DairyLine that the “medically important antimicrobial drugs” are drugs used in both human and animal medicine and, “when thinking of the drugs used in dairy animals we have to consider how they are used.”
The FDA is looking at antibiotics used in human medicine that are also used in feeds to improve feed efficiency or rate of gain in animals, according to Jonker, who said there are restrictions on the use of those drugs in dairy animals because they may show up as residues in the milk.
“We do have products that we use in dairy animals that are not used in human medicine such as ionophores,” Jonker said. They are used routinely in growing dairy animals and lactating dairy animals to improve feed efficiency and, as of now, are not considered in the FDA draft guidance.
One concern for dairy producers, according to Jonker, is medicated milk replacer, which uses important antimicrobial drugs that are also used in humans, but it’s unclear whether or not FDA views the way that they are used in milk replacers as growth enhancement, in other words, a non-therapeutic use verses a therapeutic use and that’s something that has to be explored further.
National Milk will consider that, he said, as it prepares comments on the draft guidance in the next 60 days.
There is a legitimate concern regarding the overuse of antibiotics. Case in point; one can hardly buy a hand soap today that doesn’t have antibiotics in it. Jonker said it’s not just the use of antimicrobials in animal livestock, but asks; “Is there a general overuse of antimicrobials across the general human population?”
“If you look where you are most likely to find bacteria that are resistant to a lot of different types of antimicrobials, you find them in hospitals,” Jonker concluded. “I think that there needs to be a balanced approach at looking an antimicrobial use, not just within animals, but across all uses in animals and humans.” |
| 7/8/2010 |
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