Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

In response to Deputy Deasy, the market mechanism measures we discussed previously are European Union wide. Everybody knows the law of supply and demand — if there is over-supply or lack of demand, the producer is, unfortunately, the victim. That is happening with milk production today. We argued within the European Union, with some success, for the retention of aids to private storage, intervention, which is really public storage, and export refunds. We succeeded in having the date brought forward for the implementation of some of those measures. We will argue in the management committee of the European Union next week that the measures should be improved to provide a better baseline price in the industry. Over-supply, lack of demand, currency problems and global recession are all factors in keeping the price down for the dairy producer.

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