The Ministry of Agriculture recognized the dire situations that daily farmers in northern China are in and would increase efforts to provide help to those who ended up throwing away their milk and killing their cows because of low sales revenues.
The ministry is calling dairy firms to purchase more, start dairy production regularly, and improve the prelacy support for the daily industry.
The ministry is also engaged in several discussions with major dairy firms such as the Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group as well as Mengniu Dairy Group to purchase more milk, protect the interests of the farmers, and to stabilize the prices.
Further, the ministry is set on cooperating with other central government departments, including the Ministry of Finance, so that supportive policies can be crafted to improve the welfare of dairy farmers.
The ministry recognizes the problems faced by the farmers, most of which have to throw away milk because they spoil after not being sold.
"A ton of milk has to be discarded each day," farmer Pei Shuke of east China's Shandong Province shared. "This desperate thing rarely happened before."
Similar cases can be seen across other parts of China such as Hebei and Inner Mongolia. Falling milk prices since the second half of 2014 are making farmers desperate.
In late 2013, China's dairy prices increased significantly until Feb. 2014, from which prices started to decrease until present. However, the bump in prices in late 2013 gave the dairy farmers the false hope that the milk business is good. Many purchased large numbers of dairy products even at high prices so that they could increase their production of milk.
Overproduction propelled prices to fall in March 2014 drastically, and a reverse in the downward trend is yet to be seen. Dairy companies that resorted to cheat overseas sources to respond to the lower milk prices aggravated the situation. With limited purchases from domestic milk suppliers, dairy prices slumped even further.