The difference between milk and milk

Meeting a man charged with preparing the dairy industry for life after milk quotas.

“There has been quite a lot on the agenda this year,” says Joop Kleibeuker, with a degree of understatement. Recent months have seen a series of demonstrations by dairy farmers urging governments and the EU to help them through a period of low milk prices. 

Kleibeuker, the 61-year-old secretary-general of the European Dairy Association (EDA), acts as the dairy industry’s point of contact with European institutions.

The European Commission may recently have promised to establish a €280 million fund for dairy farmers, but there is still a lot for both the EU and the EDA to do, he says.

“Many thought it would be different earlier this decade”, Kleibeuker says, because of reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 and the subsequent ‘health check’. “Many had the idea that dairy policies would become less relevant and be much more market-oriented.”

The EDA believed that, by now, it would be focused on questions about health and nutrition, or the industry’s impact on the environment, rather than on support for farmers. “Now we are discussing all three things at the same time,” says Kleibeuker.

Experience

When he took up his post in 2002, Kleibeuker brought with him a combination of experience of the scientific, environmental and business aspects of the food industry.

He studied natural sciences in the 1970s, first at the University of Groningen in the northern Netherlands and then as a postgraduate at the country’s main agricultural university in Wageningen. He continued as a scientist, working as a researcher at Unilever. And then, for two years, he headed the food inspectorate in the Dutch province of Friesland.

In 1987, he joined the Dutch dairy company Campina, working for several years to develop products for the export market, including baby food for China. Elevated to the post of vice-president, he became responsible for the environmental aspects of Campina’s business, one of the most important being more efficient packaging.

After close to 12 years in that post, he felt it was time for a change and jumped at the chance to become the EDA’s secretary-general. “They wanted someone with experience in the dairy business, and not someone that had grown up through the system,” Kleibeuker says. “I had worked with retail, processing and farmers before, so I had a range of experiences in the sector.”

He believes his scientific background is also an asset. “The dairy industry is very complex and my job is to point that out to politicians, who want it to be simple. There is a lot of explaining for me to do, as well as when I meet angry milk farmers who think that the EU is all bad.”

Stable prices

Keeping Europe’s dairy industry stable requires striking a delicate balance between farmers and politicians, he says.

Although farmers face a complete phase-out of milk quotas by 2015, Kleibeuker believes the European dairy industry will remain competitive internationally. The key is to keep prices more stable than they have been in recent years, in order to encourage investment.

“Europe has a favourable climate, knowledge and a history of dairy production,” he says. “We are in the forefront when it comes to value-added products, such as Italian, French and Dutch cheese. We cannot compete that well when it comes to commodities such as skimmed milk powder and butter.”

It is also Kleibeuker’s task to convince politicians that dairy farming plays a role in the social and economic landscape of rural Europe, a landscape that, as he points out, varies “even in the former communist countries”.

“Estonia usually has very big farms, whereas Lithuania has very small ones,” he says.

“There is a difference between milk and milk. It is too expensive to make milk for skimmed milk powder in the Alps. But there is a market and a demand for cheeses from that region. Thanks to specific herbs there, the milk tastes better than mass-produced American milk, for example,” he says. “So use it.”

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Rikard Jozwiak is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.