Milk Producers Start Newsletter

July 3, 2002

Milk Producers Start Newsletter. The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) will begin publishing a quarterly newsletter designed to analyze the flow of imported dairy products into the United States. NMPF's ImportWatch will follow changes in the levels of dairy imports affecting the domestic market. NMPF believes that the price that America's dairy farmers receive increasingly is affected by imported products displacing their own production.

"Because these imports can greatly change the supply and demand of the domestic market, ImportWatch will scrutinize the flow of these products and how they impact the U.S. dairy sector," said Jerry Kozak, president and CEO of NMPF.

Dairy imports represent a growing portion of U.S. consumption, rising from 3.1% in 1995, to 5.0% in 2000. In certain categories, including butter products and milk protein concentrate, the amount of imports has increased as much as five-fold since the mid-1990s.

"Imported products such as milk protein concentrate and butter substitutes were rarely seen less than a decade ago, but now we are bringing in larger quantities of them, and those products are displacing similar domestic products. Over time, these trends reduce U.S. farm income and have a variety of other detrimental effects on the U.S. dairy market," Kozak said.

He added that ImportWatch is designed to help dairy farmers, processors and policymakers gain a better understanding of the relationship between dairy imports and the domestic marketplace.

Although there are hundreds of different dairy products imported into the United States, ImportWatch will focus on several key categories: cheeses, including Goya and American-type, proteins, including MPC and casein, and butterfat products, including butteroil and butter substitutes. The latter two categories have seen significant increases of imports in the past five years.

"It is no coincidence that domestic supplies of skim milk powder, and now butter, have been rising at a rate similar to the rate of increase in imports of MPC and butter products," Kozak said. "If we want to understand where U.S. dairy prices are going, and how America's farmers are affected, we have to start by looking at how our market is changing because of the supply of imported products coming into this country."

Kozak said NMPF is committed to addressing the circumvention of U.S. tariffs and quotas by imported products, and that NMPF is also dedicated to ensuring that U.S. agencies, such as USDA and the U.S. Customs Service, "exercise our legitimate WTO rights to impose safeguards at the appropriate levels and properly classify dairy imports according to our tariff schedules."

ImportWatch will be published quarterly by NMPF, and will be available on NMPF's website starting next week.