Over the past five years, an international cabal of dairy industry giants, Big Dairy, that controls the processing and sales of raw milk and milk products like pasteurized milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, creamers, and ice cream, sold at retail and in restaurants, has pressured small dairy producers, farmers who actually feed and milk the cows, to restrict their operations to meet the climate goals set by Big Dairy elites.
Big Dairy’s efforts are unjustified by science, harm small dairy producers, and have raised costs to consumers. These oligopolistic practices border on enforced speech and actions on climate and energy matters and anti-trust violations. Thankfully, two groups, Heartland Impact and Consumers Defense, are leading the fight.
Heartland Impact and Consumers Defense have called on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to withdraw all support for the Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ), a United Nations developed initiative to reduce methane and other greenhouse gases from the dairy industry supply chain. Launched during Climate Week in September of 2021, P2DNZ consists of the largest dairy companies and cooperatives, controlling a huge percentage of the milk, cheese, butter, and other dairy product markets.
Working through the UN and in conjunction with multi-national and domestic companies that control large parts of dairy processing, wholesale marketing, and distribution networks to retailers in the United States, P2DNZ has pushed policies calling for dairy producers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel and fertilizer use, through what they call “voluntary measures.” They are hardly voluntary. Rather, they resemble extortion.
Just a few companies control the vast majority of the post-production milk market. Individual dairy farmers have received notices or letters from companies that purchase, process, store, and sell their finished products, requesting they report on their energy use, emissions of methane and carbon dioxide, and what efforts they are taking to reduce fossil fuel use and emissions to fight climate change.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
