Report of the Reorganisation Commission for Milk.
- Great Britain. Agricultural Marketing Reorganisation Commission.
- Date:
- 1933
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report of the Reorganisation Commission for Milk. Source: Wellcome Collection.
29/252 page 11
![1] of Creamery Proprietors and Wholesale Dairymen (Inc.), and (since 1929) the Milk Committee of the Co-operative Union, on behalf of distributors and manufacturers on the other, has be- come the marketing machinery through which an annual agree- ment has been negotiated for the sale and purchase of milk. Area Joint Committees in other large centres of population have negotiated regional agreements, which have largely followed the London agreement with adjustments to meet local conditions. Though producers’ prices have been thus negotiated over the past decade, it would be altogether wrong to assume that they have been universally accepted in practice. Many producers and distributors do not belong to any of the organizations re- presented on the negotiating bodies, and, further, the terms nego- tiated are not enforceable either upon producers or distributors, even though members of their respective organizations. ‘There is no more than a moral obligation on the part of the negotiating parties to abide by the terms agreed upon, and contracts on other terms have been freely made by producers and distributors. Never- theless, the annual agreements have provided a kind of stan- dard or guide, and have undoubtedly exercised a considerable influence over liquid-milk prices and conditions of sale during the past ten years. Written contracts, for example, are now much more general than in pre-War years. The six-monthly contract which was then common has also been largely replaced by the yearly contract, which the farmer prefers because of its greater security and because it avoids the negotiation of terms at the beginning of the summer when the production situation normally tends to make his bargaining position weak. 5. The First Agreement, 1922-3.—The first agreement negotiated by the Permanent Joint Milk Committee in 1922 bears unmistakable evidence of adaptation from some of the milk marketing schemes then in operation in the United States of America, and which about that time had been examined by a delegation from this country representing producers and distributors. These schemes, though they differ considerably, all take cognizance of the fact that milk commands different values in different channels of utilization, and. seek in diverse ways to apportion the share of the individual pro- ducer according to the value of his contribution. The scheme adopted by the Permanent Joint Milk Committee in 1922 departed from the pre-War method of sale on a flat-rate basis, and sub- stituted the “‘ basic surplus’ principle, by which each producer is presumed to receive liquid-milk values for a certain basic quantity of his supply and manufacturing values for the remainder. In the original scheme, each producer’s “standard quantity,” as it was called, was determined on the basis of his average weekly deliveries during the four months November, 1922, to February, 1923—months when production approximated closely to the requirements of the liquid milk market and which were commonly](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32177380_0029.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
