Cairo, September 22: Dairy farmers across the Eurozone are building up pressure on the EU executive, the European Commission, over falling prices and possible large-scale bankruptcies.
Farmers in the Belgian capital Brussels, the de facto capital of Europe, poured thousands of liters of milk away near the EU’s administrative body headquarters in a symbolic gesture to protest against the regulator’s policies aimed at eliminating milk production quotas in the EU region by 2015.
On the tenth day of the dairy producers’ strike, the farmers created a “milk lake” around the European Commission, demanding the withdrawal of a commission’s law which allows milk quotas to be cut by an annual one percent.
“This action is symbolic, but nearly 40 million liters of milk will be poured away elsewhere in Europe today,” European Milk Board Chief Romuald Schaber said in a letter to the EU Commission Head, Jose Manuel Barroso on Monday.
Angry farmers also burned stacks of hay and model cows in the Belgian capital.
Around 80,000 dairy farmers have been boycotting the milk supplies across the 27-member bloc in an effort to reverse the controversial law that has almost halved milk prices in many EU nations.
The farmers say that the ongoing drop in price will eventually render many milk producers bankrupt as dairy businesses have undergone massive losses since the implementation of the law in 2007.
—–Agencies