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One in six pints of milk thrown away each year, study shows
| hrowing away roughly 60m tonnes of dairy a year.
About 55m tonnes are lost before they even reach a store – during production and distribution – due to spoilage and waste at the farm, or while the milk is being distributed and exported abroad.
However, some analysts believe dairy waste figures could be as high as 30% if further inefficiencies such as flooding foreign markets, using milk as animal feed and overconsumption, are taken into account.
| “To achieve a more efficient system, and reduce the environmental impacts from our food production, we need to consider ways to reduce all these sources of loss,” said Alexander.
In many developing countries, the percentage of milk lost from farm to store is much higher than in more economically developed countries, due to difficulties in storing and transporting products. For example, 15% of Oman’s milk is lost at the farm level,
| compared with 0% in Sweden, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
In more developed countries, such as the UK, milk and dairy tend to get thrown away at the retailer and consumer level. According to Wrap, the UK government’s waste reduction body, a fifth of all food waste in the UK is dairy.
Despite this, dairy production has been growing rapidly around the world over the past four years,
| rising by 6% between 2014 and 2018, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The biggest production increases were seen in India, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland.
Europe significantly increased its production of milk in 2015 when the European milk quota was lifted, which had limited the amount farmers could produce.
How profit-driven inbreeding could bring the world dairy herd to its knees
| Farmers across Europe rushed to increase their output to maximise profits at the same time demand for dairy fell in Asia, particularly in China and Russia. European dairy markets flooded, causing what some have called a “milk price crisis”.
“You can tell when there’s a surplus because prices go down,” said Kevin Bellamy, dairy head of F&A Sector Banking, the biggest dairy bank in the world.
|
In the EU, milk prices fell from an average of 37 cents per kg in 2014 to 28 cents in 2018, according to the European Milk Board (EMB). World milk prices did recover somewhat in 2016, though not to pre-2014 levels.
The EMB estimates that major production increases in this period led to a surplus of 11m tonnes on the world market.
| The European commission has taken some action to temper the effects of market liberalisation. Since July 2015, it has bought around 380,000 tonnes of skimmed milk powder from overproduction into public storage – known as a demand intervention scheme. The European commission is now trying to sell this powder, but as supply increases, prices fall.
The majority of dairy farms in Europe are small-scale family-run businesses and any reduction in production means a loss of family income.
| Low milk prices have had little effect on levels of output as farmers continue to produce more milk to prop up their cash flow.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/28/one-in-six-pints-of-milk-thrown-away-each-year-study-shows
| This is insanity.
| I mean it goes bad fast
| >>515622 yes it does
While the content of the article is pretty interesting and not surprising, I find it strange that they used "one in six pints" and "thrown away" in the title. It's obviously designed to, or at least unintentionally suggests, that most of the milk loss is post-sale.
Still, while this is a waste of good milk, it's also not an unreasonably high percentage.
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| One in six pints of milk produced around the world is lost or wasted, according to research conducted at Edinburgh University for the Guardian.
Sixteen percent of dairy products – 116m tonnes – is lost or discarded globally each year, according to Prof Peter Alexander, a member of the newly formed Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security. He calculated that retailers, distributors and consumers are responsible for half of this waste