The global drift

The news that Dairy Crest has sold off its dairies to Müller UK & Ireland hit the airwaves this week, and my phone rang. It was a nice researcher from BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today. You all may be familiar with it. We chatted amiably about the purchase and the implications for the British farmer a bit, and then I sputtered when he asked if I would go on the radio. No, I’m rubbish when I get interviewed, which is kind of ironic for a person that does interviews for a living. So, no Farming Today for me. I think he found someone more radio-friendly anyway.

I do know a secret though – they tape the inteviews the day before. At any rate, we discussed what the Competiton Commission here in the UK would have to say about Müller owning about 50 per cent of the total liquid market, with Arla owning most of the other half. I am sure it will be brought before it and some kind of deal hammered out.

I think the purchase just disproves David Cameron’s idea that we can blithely walk away from the European Union. Er, not if we want our interests in Europe protected, we won’t. I think we’ve all gone too far down the path of globalization to try and pull up the drawbridge on Castle UK and we wouldn’t want to deal with the consequences of trying to do that.

A small part of me worries about the Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia aspect of how the dairy market is moving, but I tend to drift optimistic and think, oh, there will be ways and means. It’s in nobody’s interests to completely crush the producer in all this, nor the processor. Global companies can co-exist quite comforably with the small producer, and have done for quite some time.

These are interesting times.