Canada not at fault for what ails US milk market

In recent weeks, on the U.S. side of the border with Canada, much noise has been made about a festering dispute with our Canadian neighbors over ultra-filtered milk in U.S.-Canadian dairy trade. Ultra-filtered milk is condensed skim milk; a high protein, fat adjusted, reduced cost ingredient, used to fortify cheese and yogurt products. It did not exist at the time the North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA) was signed. Ultra-filtered milk is an American contrivance deliberately designed to make a “trade loophole” to facilitate an end-run around Canadian negotiated NAFTA import tariff restrictions. An ever increasing amount of Canadian milk was being displaced in Canadian cheese and yogurt processing plants. From 2011 to 2016, U.S. exports of ultra-filtered milk to Canada increased from $33 million, (US) to $98 million; a threefold increase. As matters were progressing, either Canada could rollover and watch its dairy farms be forced out of existence or they could stand-up to what was seen as a gross injustice and protect a vital national interest. In 2016 the Canadian farmers devised a solution: changing their pricing structure to allow Canadian produced ultra-filtered milk and other milk protein products to be sold at world market price to Canadian dairy processors. The Canadian government did not impose any tariff restriction on U.S. sourced ultra-filtered milk, as has been erroneously claimed in some U.S. media reports; it merely allowed Canadian milk protein products to compete with U.S. products, head to head, on a level playing field. Once again, Canadians were buying Canadian.Canada’s contention that U.S. over-production of milk is the real cause of U.S. dairy farmers’ difficulties has a solid basis in fact. For the last three spring seasons vast amounts of U.S. milk have had to be dumped because milk supplies out stripped U.S. processing capacity. More than 400 tractor trailer loads of milk per month were dumped on several occasions in Federal Milk Marketing Order No. 1 alone.