Sticking point is how much access U.K. producers should have to the Canadian cheese market

  • @nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
    7•10 months ago

    You suggest SM is not a good idea but you don’t point out an alternative, beggaring the question.

    Because I’ve had this discussion ad nauseum. The idea that there’s literally no alternative to SM for dairy only makes sense if you carefully ignore every other country.

    Surely you don’t think the American super-capitalist market-forces brochure bait is better.

    I don’t know what you think the Americans do, but what they actually do is heavily subsidize their dairy industry (tens of billions) which drives down costs of dairy and causes their industry to oversupply which means they have lots of cheap milk (some of it of dubious quality) to export . If a country simply opens their market to American dairy without restrictions, it often leads to local industry getting wiped out as a result.

    I am not suggesting we open our market in this way, nor is any sane person. But the subsidy model is better than SM. It’s less heavy-handed, allows for new entrants into the market, and we can open our borders with caveats (tariffs on subsidized dairy, quality rules). Plenty of countries do it.

    • @Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      But that’s the reason we have it. The US would destroy our market. Is there a better way maybe but why should we subsidize the industry to create more dairy then we need?

      • @nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
        2•10 months ago

        But that’s the reason we have it. The US would destroy our market.

        Tariffs take care of that. American dairy isn’t magic - it’s just subsidized. Dairy tariffs will prevent American dairy from destroying our market. We ourselves don’t have to subsidize it to the same extent the Americans do. Right now if you want to go into dairy farming your best option is to inherit a dairy farm. Barring that the barrier to entry for you to be able to legally milk a cow and sell the milk is absolutely massive. If you want to create higher quality milk? Well too bad it’ll all get pooled anyways. SM is the most heavy handed way to manage any market and it’s fundamentally unnecessary.

        • @m0darn@lemmy.ca
          2•10 months ago

          I’m with you.

          I agree that SM isn’t serving Canadians, and that we should have a system that protects domestic dairy farmers and other ‘staple’ producers as an essential part of our national food security infrastructure. A well regulated market is the answer here.

          A bit of a nonsequiter but: Instead of trusting a precariously funded patchwork of volunteer organizations, we should have a national system for getting food to hungry Canadians. I think we should leverage the existing national food distribution oligopoly (Loblaw/Sobey) to accomplish this.