With many dairy farmers under increasing financial pressure, and some in danger of closing down due to the persistently low price of milk, the Queensland dairy farming industry is launching a campaign to encourage consumers to buy milk sporting the ‘Fair Go Dairy’ label.
If a dairy brand or processor has the Fair Go Dairy label on their products, it means that it can verify it pays its farmers 73 cents a litre for milk – considered the sustainable and fair farmgate price.
Shoppers will then be able to look out for the logo, wherever they buy their milk.
Make no mistakes about it: this is the final straw for our dairy farmers.
I for one will be supporting this campaign, because buying milk has always been an exercise fraught with morals and concerns for me.
I want to do my bit to support the farmers, so I don’t buy cheap, supermarket branded milk, because the supermarkets are apparently underpaying the farmers and making it difficult for them to financially survive.
But then Coles and Woolies bumped up the price of milk by 10c per litre, leading us to believe that they were paying farmers an adequate price.
We’ve since learnt that this is not the case – and in fact, Coles reportedly only handed over an extra 3.5 cents per litre to the industry.
Coles has now been forced to pay the $5.25 million shortfall
Eric Danzi from the Queensland Dairy Farmers Organisation, which is behind the Fair Go Dairy campaign, told A Current Affair the industry is at breaking point.
“What Coles has done to dairy farmers in the last nine years has been un-Australian. They’ve forced a lot out the door, made them go broke, all for their own corporate greed to sell milk at a loss in the shop and get consumers to be sucked into going into stores and making money off other products,” he said.
The ‘Fair Go Dairy’ campaign will launch in March (pushed back from a planned January launch, out of respect for those farmers impacted by the bushfires), with plans to eventually go national.
