Food crisis reaches Europe

BERLIN, May 28 (UPI) -- The global food crisis has reached Europe: While EU countries aim to help stabilize food prices and increase aid to developing countries, dairy farmers in Germany and in several other European countries announced strikes that may render shelves empty.

Have you recently checked your shopping bill? Global food prices have roughly doubled over the past three years, sparking demonstrations and riots in several developing countries. Compared to eight years ago, when EU nations joined efforts to -- among other projects -- halve the number of people who suffer from hunger and extreme poverty by 2015 (the so-called Millennium Development Goals), food prices even soared by 75 percent, according to a World Bank report.

Thus, the money allocated in 2000 to fight hunger is now falling dangerously short. Of course, the EU still is the world's biggest donor, but the amount of money donated by the EU in 2007 decreased for the first time in seven years, by $2.5 billion to $72 billion -- a dangerous development given the escalating prices not only for food, but also for energy and steel.

Voices inside the EU at a Tuesday meeting in Brussels have called to increase aid levels significantly by 2010. Over the past weeks, EU officials have also talked about how to best control prices at home.

A hands-down subsidies war is being waged between the German and French agricultural ministers, who stand on opposite sides of the field when it comes to the milk quota. The quota was introduced in 1984 to regulate dairy overproduction; experts are divided on whether it benefited or hurt dairy farmers in Europe. France wants to raise quotas by 5 percent until 2015, the year when the quotas are to be abolished. Germany is against raising the quota (and thus production), as prices for milk would likely fall even further.

And that's the ironic thing in the struggle: Despite rising food and commodity prices, dairy products remain relatively cheap. So cheap, in fact, that German dairy farmers Tuesday started a strike that is to last until dairy factories offer them a higher price for their produce. While the costs for cow feed, energy and fertilizer have shot up to the sky, the money that farmers get for their milk has even dropped slightly. They are getting between 27 eurocents and 35 eurocents, while production costs tower at an estimated 33.2 eurocents. Farmers want 40 eurocents to break even, and their demands -- the respective means -- are justified, politicians say, because unlike the supermarkets, which are able to make milk more expensive, the farmers get a fixed price for their produce.

"With every liter farmers are milking, they are coming one step closer to bankruptcy," Ulrike Hoefken, a lawmaker from the German Green Party and the head of the Agriculture Committee in Parliament, told German radio station Deutschlandfunk. "The strike is their last chance."

And it could become a powerful tool to alert Germans to the problems faced by their dairy farmers. While dairy factories claim they can easily stem strike-related milk shortages, officials from the farmers' union have warned that German customers may see empty shelves in supermarkets as soon as the end of this week.

This could even be expanded to other countries. Stefan Mann, a senior official at the Federation of German Dairy Farmers, told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that he expects several other European countries to join the strike.

Already, farmers in the Netherlands are protesting, and Mann said he expects solidarity from farmers in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

Better stock up on milk products, he added.