Sunday 18 October 2009

Fair trade for farmers


This year across Europe, the price that supermarkets pay farmers for their milk has gone down by nearly a third – but the shelf price that you and I pay for a litre of milk has hardly changed.
The farmers incomes are slashed, the consumers don’t benefit, the supermarkets pocket the difference.
We have the tragic irony of millions of consumers going to the supermarket each week, going down one aisle and buying fair trade Columbian coffee and then going down the next aisle and buying the milk to put in that fair trade coffee from an exploited British dairy farmer.
And the same exploitation happens right across our food market in every sector of farming.
Lib Dems would introduce a powerful food market regulator to enforce fair trade for British farmers because it’s wrong that farmers are going under, we need them to thrive for the future of rural communities as a whole.