The group representing dairy farmers has called for the introduction of an EU-wide scheme to pay farmers to lower their milk production.
The call from the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) is aimed at addressing the sustained drop in milk prices in recent months, which dairy farmers say has led to prices falling below the cost of production in some cases.
Estimates suggest global milk supplies rose by around 2% in 2025 (compared to a small drop in 2024), leading to an oversupply.
This has seen the price per litre paid to dairy farmers by co-operatives fall significantly in recent months, from over 50 cent to below 33 cent for certain farmers, according to the ICMSA.
ICMSA President Denis Drennan has called for the EU Commission to “immediately introduce a EU-wide Voluntary Milk Supply Reduction Scheme that will reduce supply coming onto markets in a way that’s proven to put a floor under falling farmer milk prices”.
“Such a scheme is a tried and tested method that has previously worked in very similar circumstances and would provide badly needed support for farmer primary-producers in Ireland and right across the EU as we face into the critical late-Spring/early Summer peak production period,” he said.
Mr Drennan added “it’s very obvious the global market is currently oversupplied. The market has probably overcorrected but the only person paying the price for this market turbulence is the dairy farmer”.
“No one else in the dairy sector, whether personally or as a business, is taking the kind of financial hit that results from the milk price falling from over 50 cent per litre to below 33 cent per litre in some cases,” he stated.
“These kinds of price and income falls are not sustainable and are steadily undermining the farmer link in our multi-billion euro dairy sector – everyone along the supply chain benefits from a market upturn, but only the farmer suffers from a market downturn,” he said.
In 2016 the EU introduced a support scheme to help reduce milk production amid an oversupply.
Nearly 44,000 farmers from across the bloc applied for support under it, agreeing to voluntarily reduce their production of milk by nearly 852 000 tonnes in the last quarter of 2016.
The ICMSA President said that scheme “worked almost immediately by changing market sentiment and, critically, it provided dairy farmers with an option of either producing more, the same, or less milk in a market downturn”.
Mr Drennan said the Government “should throw its full weight behind an easy and affordable solution that will restore market balance in a speedy and transparent way”.
