The National Milk Producers Federation’s Shawna Morris explained how the shipping challenges happening at the moment are hurting dairy products in more than one way. The impact isn’t only on products getting to the country, but exporting dairy products as well.
“As much as all of us who buy so much that’s produced in Asia are necessarily focused on how do we buy on our store shelves the imported products, there’s a flip side of this issue as well. It’s how do we get our American-made products to the foreign consumers that need them, food that feeds people across Asia,” she said.
This is one more hurdle the dairy industry has to figure out a way around. Exporters have been dealing with trying to navigate the costs and time involved in getting their products out the door. If you look at the cooperatives, for example, a significant amount of them are farmer-owned, so the impact hits everyone including the farmers. Clearly, something needs to change because the market isn’t improving, which implies that it won’t get better anytime soon.
U.S. Dairy Export Federation Economists estimate that through the first seven months of the year, the toll on dairy added up to $7 billion. So the big question is, how long does this go on for? “A lot of our foreign customers are eyeing, well, could they get things faster and more dependently from Europe, from New Zealand,” Morris explained. “That hits, not just exporters, but ultimately impacts demand for U.S. dairy farmers milk.”
In order to make these issues a little bit better, she suggests the administration needs to step in and do more. “We definitely have been strongly encouraging the administration to take further steps to help make better usage of expanded hours, perhaps expansions of customs authorities, looking at what more we can do to ensure that we have truckers actually moving the product as effectively as we need to and that they’re able to move through the ports,” Morris said.
