An insight into a warmer future?

MILK and DAIRY PRICES

You may have heard that milk prices worldwide are rising at the
fastest rates ever. Unfortunately, prices for other dairy
products will be higher for the foreseeable future due to :

• An increased worldwide demand for milk
• Higher transportation costs
• Increased corn prices (the primary dairy cattle feed) because of the growth of the ethanol industry

Here is the notice that can now be found next to the jugs of milk in some grocery stores in the Boston area. If the price of milk by-products is still relatively stable, consumers now have to pay almost 4$ to buy a gallon of milk, which represents a 92 cents increase in comparison with last year.

It is undoubtedly a bad news for milk, cheese and other pizza addicts, but this notice is probably a very accurate insight of the life we will have in a warmer world. According to the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment Synthesis Team, milk production in the Northeast (but also in the rest of the United States) is likely to be strongly impacted by warmer summers, as ruminants are highly sensitive to temperatures above 24°C (75°F). As summers get warmer, it will become more and more necessary to invest large amounts of money into new cooling capacities to ensure a stable production. Of course, such investments are more than likely to have an impact on milk prices...

But milk production will also be negatively impacted in other parts of the world. The current increase of prices is partly due to the catastrophic drought currently experienced by the traditional suppliers of Asia's growing thirst for dairy products, Australia and New Zealand. Such production shortenings are likely to become common sight in the future.

Finally, milk prices are impacted by the fact that the percentage of the American corn crop used for the ever-increasing ethanol production has been rising sharply from 12% in 2004 to 20% in 2006, according to the American Coalition for Ethanol. No wonder then that milk prices are soaring! We probably better have to get used to black coffee... in our new warmer world.

Special thanks to Lucas Guillet and Claire Notin for the well-documented report on climate change and agriculture in the United States.

Photo : www.mothercow.org/oxen/got-milk.html