Waleed Aly is renowned for his poignant opinion pieces on The Project, and last night he delivered what he called “the greatest call to arms I have ever made”.
“Dairy farmers are begging us to eat more locally produced cheese,” Waleed told to the Tuesday night audience, explaining that our dairy farmers are suffering from an inherently unfair relationship with the country’s two largest dairy companies, Murray Goulburn and Fonterra.
Over the past month, Waleed says farmgate milk prices have been drastically slashed, meaning many local milk farmers are staring down bankruptcy. The changes mean that milk farmers are now paid 37 cents for each litre which costs them 38 cents to make.
Top Comments
I agree we need to support the farmers but none of these stories are giving us easy instructions on how to help. My family drinks about 12 litres of milk a week and I usually buy the $2 for 2 litre bottles. I can afford to spend a bit more but looking today the other options were more than double the price and I don't even know which to buy. Some comments I am reading say even if I spend over $4 for 2 litres the farmers won't get any more. Can someone make it easy for people like myself to do the right thing?
Why are we being encouraged to buy brand name milk? Doesn't store brand milk come from our farmers? And if store brand does come from our farmers, won't we be hurting them in the long run if we boycott store brand? Won't they lose their contracts when demand for store brand milk drops off?
Store brand milk comes from whoever can supply it the cheapest today.
It's not Coles or Woolies that take the hit to get the price down, it's usually the producer who has absolutely no say in the matter. Which is exactly what is happening here.
What use is a contract when you have to pay the buyer to take it from you?!?
I know its the farmers that get shafted, not the supermarket chains, I didn't say otherwise. The article states to buy branded milk to get Australian produced milk. Which has me questioning where our milk comes from. And there must be contracts in place for store brand milk, I dont believe there are milk markets like fruit markets.