The last three weeks have seen me in Kazakhstan (interfaith conference), Brussels (round-table with Herman van Rompuy), then Dresden (preaching at the Frauenkirche). All good gigs, but all it does is build a backlog of work at home. It has also squeezed out any blogging – or any creative thought, for that matter. And I’ve missed almost all the football in Euro 2012. And I forgot to change my fantasy team in time and am now doing rubbish.
Of course, had I had the space to do so, I would have blogged about women bishops, Church of England PR, the Telegraph’s useless commenting on the C of E’s input to a consultation on Europe (don’t these guys bother to read the originals before launching their self-important second-hand opinions), Euro 2012, the poignancy of preaching in Dresden’s Frauenkirche (especially when the tourists leave in droves before the sermon), the Euro-crisis and Angela Merkel, the Greek elections, developments in Egypt, destruction of a church in Sudan, the future of the Diocese of Bradford (in the light of proposals to dissolve it), lots of other stuff, and the price of milk.
Actually, I really did want to write about the price of milk. I was shocked to hear further evidence recently of how the power of the supermarkets to control milk prices now makes a bottle of water more expensive than a pint of milk. And who gets screwed? The farmers. What do you make of this:
- Currently dairy contracts allow milk purchasers to make significant changes to the terms and conditions in the contract and lower the milk price paid, often with less than 30 days’ notice, whilst the producer is often locked in to the contract for the next 12 to 24 months. No wonder the National Farmers Union (NFU) is calling for (a) clear price determination, and (b) shorter break clauses / right to terminate. (The NFU believes this is not solely about milk price – it is about establishing a functional market place which has true liquidity and therefore incentivises milk purchasers to offer a competitive milk price.)
- The farmer should know at any time what their milk price is. Isn’t it rather shocking that they don’t? Shouldn’t the price be specified in the contract between purchaser and provider? Isn’t that rather obvious? At the moment many milk buyers have the ‘discretion’ to change the price a farmer receives at will and potentially retrospectively.
- Recently farmers in my neck of the woods were informed that the price they received for each litre of milk would be reduced by 2p. The average farmer around here works that out around a staggering sum of £20,000 per annum. One farmer in my diocese stands to lose £10,000 this year – from a small farm.
What I find amazing is that (a) this can happen without the farmer having any recourse to negotiation and (b) that most of us drink the white stuff without any recognition of where it comes from or who pays the real price for it.
I’m no expert, but I now understand why the General Synod of the Churhc of England has so often banged on about the power of supermarkets. I’m not against them – after all, I use them. But, there is an issue of economic and social justice here. And we can’t blame the cows.
June 20, 2012 at 11:41 pm
Thank you for highlighting this issue in a forum that is ‘not part of the usual suspects’. I hope and pray that you can help make a difference to a problem that has been around for at least the last 20 years (in one form or another) and which no one seems willing to want to solve. The number of dairy farmers who have gone out of business in that period is huge – starting with the tenant farmers. This has got so bad that we are now importing milk – a foodstuff in which we should be self sufficient. In Yorkshire – particularly West Yorkshire – we have a very high percentage of the land area which can only be used for grazing – if dairy farmers are pushed out of business by supermarkets trying to pass on their loss leading price cuts then we will be all the worse off for that – not only in terms of our rural economy (each farm supports on average another 80 local businesses) but also in terms of our precious landscape and our food security.
Thank you for raising this
Sally Rawlings
June 20, 2012 at 11:51 pm
Nice to have you back Nick,,and still talking to us after the rather interesting turn the gay marriage thread took lol
I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that supermarkets are vicious and brutal in the way they treat farmers and suppliers, and the likes of Asda and Tesco etc, along with some of the others are now so big that there, very sadly, appears very little that the producersand suppliers can do about it to fight back against the corporate machine effectively. Hmm…I knew my Economics degree would come in useful one day!
I once paid a visit from Skegness (not my favourite town in the world by any means) to Boston in Lincolnshire. The town centre in Boston was like a ghost town when we arrived, with many shop windows all boarded up, and a large, almost cathedral size parish church at the end of the high street! It was fairly obvious that a couple of out of town mega supermarkets had opened up nearby!
The obscene power of supermarkets…now that is a battle worth fighting lol
Re the daily Telegraph… Fully agree with your sentiments regarding the poor journalism etc. I usually cannot stomach the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party for more than 5 minutes in the House of Parliamnet or newsnight. Their myopic insularity drives me nuts. Which is why I was a bit worried on the gay mattiage “”we intend to fight this battle all the wa”y stuff of last week, as I think there is a very real danger that it will play right into the hands of the Daily Telegraph broadsheeters on the one hand, and the Daily Mail tabloiders on the other.
As you inferred, if the Cof E had a really decent Press Office machine, it would not be as much of a problem, but that is still some way off it would appear, and I dread to think what the Telegraph, Mail et al will make of the headlines that will undoubtedly ensue, if their response to the consultation on Europe is anything to go by.
June 21, 2012 at 1:24 am
This has been going in for years, Nick, and it’s not just in the dairy sector. The supermarkets do the same to all producers. It’s bad enough that it happens to UK farmers, but they screw Africa as well and that is life or death stuff
Evil? I think so
Thanks for your post. My family farm so we have gone through this over and over again
June 21, 2012 at 1:25 am
Reblogged this on the elves are heading west.
June 21, 2012 at 7:14 am
The water comparison is a bit nonsense when you think about it – I can turn on my tap and fill a bottle for a marginal cost of close to zero. A proper comparison would be with carefully branded and selected premium milk brands rather than with the commodity product.
And let’s beat up the right target – most farm gate milk is bought by the fragments of the old milk marketing board or large manfacturers – you’ll have seen the trucks saying Arla. Robert Wiseman, Muller etc. – not by the supermarkets.
June 21, 2012 at 9:04 am
Recently speaking to a dairy farmer in my parish and with the reduction in the price of milk he has lost £21,000 per annum. He’s not a large producer about 80 head of cattle and he manages to keep going, but he is one of the last milk producers in this area.
He said the only way to soak up the kind of price fluctuation was to become a mega producer with herds of over 200 plus cattle, but the investment needed for new a milking parlor was far beyond his reach.
I still don’t understand why the price of supermarket milk needs to be so competitive. I’m sure the British public would happily pay a few pence more to keep farms in business if they knew what was going on behind the scenes.
June 21, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Hi Bishop Nick. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot (lot lot lot) more on women bishops in the coming month, but for now I’m curious about your thoughts on Church of England PR. If the accepted wisdom is that it’s not very good, then why not? Surely there’s no excuse, especially from an organisation almost entirely staffed by extremely highly educated, articulate individuals skilled in the art of communication! It’s not enough to say that news management is not your business, when you know that everything you do is going to be reported, and not always favourably.
June 21, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Hmm…
1. The excessive power of supermarkets driving decent peopel almost out of business
2. The truly awfulMichael Gove – esp his undying love for Rupert Murdoch and his his appalling attempts to restore a loathsome elitist education system) etc -( I am with Lord Leveson all the way in my opinion of Mr Gove).
Now these are fights that are really worth having imho and battles that the Church of England should be willing to engage in..
June 22, 2012 at 12:48 am
John Millward
I think that is brilliantly put and a very fair question to ask.
Given the challenges that the new Archbishop of Canterbury will face, such as the Admission of women to the Episcopate and the potential fallout from it, the whole are surrounding gay marriage etc, to nabe but two, it is crucial that an extremely switched on media/PR team is in place both nationally at Lambeth Palace level and locally. I think some Dioceses are much better than others, although mistakes will inevitably be made,
And news management is going to be so crucial over the next month in particular. I am strugggling to see how a positive spin can be put on what may well unfold at General Synod..ie the very real possibility of the amended legislation put to Synod by the HOB being defeated by both its opponents (who are still not going to vote in favour despite the amendments) , and many of its supporters, who are not at all imrressed with the legislation as it now stands. Add to tisi the fact that the Bishops’ amendments could be defeated by both the Houses of Clergy and Laity, I hope the Church of England have got their very best Press Officers primed for action!
Some might say that is a reason to persuade supporters to vote for the motion no matter how aggrieved they feel in order to avoid a bad press story. I personally don’t buy that for one minute, and feel that we should have a robust enough Press department to deal with what is likely to unfold, as the most important thing is that we get the legislation right, and if that means returning it to the House of Bishops for further work to be done, so be it.
John is absolutely right though. We are going to hear a lot, lot more over the cioming month or so. How well it reflects on the C of E remains to be seen, but I am not overly optimistic, and it could all have been so easily avoided if the legislation had gone straight to Synod as the Dioceses had requested..we then might have truly had a good news story to report.
July 6, 2012 at 8:00 pm
[...] a comment on the nature of the Synod's agenda for the next five days. It follows on from a bit of a rant I had recently about the price of [...]
July 21, 2012 at 5:06 pm
[...] be interested in the details of the price of milk. But, I am and have posted on the matter recently here and here. And now look what has happened after the farmers’ [...]