Tesco has announced two new schemes to pay dairy farmers more for their milk. It will offer direct contracts to 850 UK farmers, paying them £0.22 per litre, well above the current market average. It will also offer locally-sourced “localchoice” milk, which will be more expensive than ordinary milk but is more environmentally friendly, having a smaller carbon footprint due to having travelled a shorter distance from source to point of sale, and will also offer higher returns for local farms. UK dairy farmers have held several protests against UK supermarkets, saying that the companies were not paying them a fair or sustainable price for their milk due to their price wars which drove the price of milk continually lower. This move should help to boost dairy farmers’ profits, which have been suffering in recent years for several reasons, amongst them the abolition of guaranteed pricing, CAP reform, and market forces.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6…