Canada’s dairy supply management system is attractive to some U.S. farmers

Aug 22, 2017
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

Canadian Government vowed to defend supply management during NAFTA talks

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

Some American farm groups are looking at Canada’s dairy supply management system and discussing whether or not the United States should adopt a similar system.

Even farmers in Wisconsin, one of America’s largest dairy-producing states and where Grassland Dairy, a large dairy processor began refusing milk intake from local producers because of Canada’s dairy rules, are open to the idea of supply management.

“Canada’s supply management program might not be perfect, but it certainly is doing a good enough job to make sure that those farmers, especially on the dairy side in Canada, can continue to stay in business and hand that farm on to the next generation,” Darin Von Ruden, head of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, told the Canadian Press on August 18.

“I would hate to go after a program that’s protecting farmers, when that’s really what farmers in the U.S. are asking (for).”

Supply management has been a hot button issue leading up to the NAFTA negotiations.

In April, Senators from New York and Wisconsin wrote a letter to President Trump asking his administration to take action against Canada for its Class 7 National Ingredients Strategy and Ontario’s Class 6 pricing program on ultra-filtered milk.

But Canadian Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay held his ground on the issue.

“We are the party that fought to put supply management in place and we’re the government that’s going to defend it,” he told reporters on June 21.

And on June 12, a group of five farm and rural organizations wrote a letter to U.S. trade officials suggesting they consider an American supply management system.

“The lack of U.S. dairy supply management results in overproduction and dairy processors pouring millions of gallons of raw milk down high tech sewers,” reads a June 12 letter from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Food & Water Watch, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Rural Coalition and the Western Organization of Resource Councils, to Edward Gresser, Chair of the (U.S.) Trade Policy Staff Committee.

“…the U.S. should emulate Canadian dairy supply management and export high quality dairy products…”

Farms.com has reached out to Dairy Farmers of America and Dairy Farmers of Ontario for comments on the future of supply management.

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