Milk prices will go up in the State by ₹4 a litre from Saturday, with Kerala Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (KCMMF-Milma) deciding to hike the procurement and sale prices to aid the ailing dairy cooperative sector.
The last time Milma hiked milk prices was in July 2014, when milk prices went up by ₹3. The price of all variants of milk will go up.
Announcing the decision here on Thursday, Milma chairman P.T. Gopalakurup said that of the ₹4 being hiked, ₹3.35 will go to dairy farmers, 32 paise to the cooperatives, ₹16 to the selling agents and the rest to dairy farmers’ welfare fund and others.
Production costs have gone up tremendously in the sector in the past two years and with milk procurement prices not going up proportionately, dairy farmers have been an unhappy lot. Milma was forced to hike prices to help farmers and to prevent them from quitting the dairy sector, Mr. Kurup said.
On an average, the production cost incurred by a dairy farmer to produce a litre of milk is about ₹42.44, whereas the average price he is being paid for the same by Milma at present is ₹30.12.
While the present hike in milk prices will not cover the loss being incurred by dairy farmers, they will get a hike of ₹4 and 2 paise a litre of milk of average standards (4.1% fat and 8.3% solid non fat). The farmer will get about ₹34.14 a litre of milk now, Mr. Kurup said.
This is the highest price paid to farmers in the dairy cooperatives across the country. Though there had been surplus milk production in the State after 2011 by nearly 40 per cent, the rise in the cost of production had climbed in recent years. The price of cattle feed and hay was up; green grass was no longer available, and drought across the State has resulted in a huge crisis in the sector.
Milma’s average daily sale of milk is about 13.2 lakh litres, out of which, local procurement is about 9.8 lakh litres.
“Things had been looking up for a while and our local procurement had come up to 11.5 lakh litres a day. Last year, during the same period, we were bringing in only about two-lakh litres of milk daily from neighbouring States. Our daily procurement from outside the State stands at over four-lakh litres now,” a senior Milma official said.
In the last two years, there had been surplus milk production across the country but now production was going down steeply and with the imminent drought, there could be a situation of milk shortage as well as huge hike in prices across the country.
Not just milk, the cost of all dairy products such as curd, milk powder, butter, ghee are set for a hike.
