About a month ago I woke up with a cramp in my leg that reminded me what real pain is. I hadn’t had a muscle spasm like that since I was a kid. The problem, I self-assessed, was a lack of calcium. In the last few days I hadn’t been drinking enough milk.
While there may be other ways to obtain enough dietary calcium than through milk, I have yet to discover them. Maybe it’s my genetics that demands my body consume at least one glass of milk per day. Or maybe it’s environmental: I grew up on a dairy farm where drinking milk at every meal was normal. Perhaps I’ve developed a long-term dependency where I can no longer live without.
Whatever your thoughts on adults drinking milk (it’s arguably unnatural, but so are many things), the benefits to growing children are indisputable – healthier teeth and skin, stronger bones, and aided muscle development. For adults, it helps lower blood pressure (and reduces risk of muscle spasms for some).
We’re hearing a lot about the dairy industry during the latest NAFTA talks. Canada’s supply-management system is a unique beast in our free-market world. It’s protected from imports, while the industry is essentially restricted in how much milk it can produce.
Our family farm benefited from this system. With 30 dairy cows (a small-scale farm if ever there was one), my parents’ farm stayed afloat during some disastrous decades of low grain prices and drought. With a guaranteed price for milk, Canadian dairy farmers don’t have to worry about price fluctuations.
American dairy farmers, on the other hand, do. And they’re struggling. They're experiencing what one could call a market failure – where producers can’t obtain a sufficient price for their product. It happens all the time in agriculture, hence the need for subsidies. The U.S. has not hesitated to subsidize its farmers over and over again. But as subsidies have dried up, they now desperately want a chance to sell their milk to Canada.
The only other option would be to create what we have, a supply-management system of their own, an option that some American dairy groups are actually advocating for. But for a Republican administration, this would be akin to starting a Soviet collective farm. Instead, they'd rather have Canadian farmers feel the same pain.
While free trade deals are generally good for economies, we know they’re not always good for certain workers. Some industries are more vulnerable than others. For dairy farmers, losing supply-management could be disastrous.
Sure, consumers may benefit from the flood of cheap American milk, just like we benefit from cheap clothing from Vietnam where workers get paid a pittance compared to ours. Buying milk is more expensive here, but we could also say the same about milk’s best friend, cereal, where the majority of the profits go to corporations as opposed to the farmers who grow the grain.
With milk, at least you know the money’s going directly to the farmer. It’s a system that works remarkably well, but is anathema to free markets and trade.
And these days, for better or worse, free trade rules the day.
