Up to 1B litres of milk dumped yearly due to supply management: Study

Canadian dairy farmers may be discarding as much as one billion litres of milk annually as a result of the country’s supply management system.

Source: Rawpixel

Canadian dairy farmers may be discarding as much as one billion litres of milk annually as a result of the country’s supply management system, according to a joint academic study that raises questions about food waste, environmental costs, and policy design.

The estimate comes from research conducted by scholars from Dalhousie University and McGill University, Thomas Elliott, Benjamin Goldstein and food policy expert Sylvain Charlebois. Their analysis suggests large volumes of milk are routinely disposed of on farms to manage oversupply rather than for food safety reasons.

Using a material flow analysis, the researchers estimate that approximately 6.8 billion litres of raw milk have been discarded on Canadian dairy farms since 2012. They estimate the total economic value of that lost production at about $14.9 billion.

The study says the lack of transparent and publicly available data on milk disposal has obscured the scale of the issue and limited efforts to address it.

“A lack of transparent data on discarded milk means that the scale of this issue is unknown,” the authors wrote, adding that this hinders action to mitigate environmental, economic, and nutritional losses.

According to the researchers’ estimates, the discarded milk over the 12-year period is associated with roughly 8.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. They also calculate that the wasted milk would have been sufficient to meet the annual dairy needs of about 4.2 million people, or roughly 11 per cent of Canada’s population.

Canada’s dairy sector operates under a supply management system that uses production quotas, price controls, and import restrictions to match domestic supply with demand and provide income stability for farmers. When production exceeds consumption targets, surplus milk can be dumped, used as feed, or otherwise removed from the human food supply.

Charlebois has argued publicly that the disposal of milk is a structural feature of the system. In a recent opinion column, he cited the same Dalhousie–McGill research, estimating that Canadian dairy farmers discard anywhere from hundreds of millions to as much as one billion litres of milk annually to prevent oversupply and maintain prices.

He has said that, in a country facing persistent food affordability pressures, the routine destruction of large volumes of food is increasingly difficult to justify and risks eroding public confidence in supply management.

The study recommends greater transparency around the volume of milk being discarded, changes to incentives that encourage farmers to overproduce, and adjustments to quota-setting mechanisms to better reflect shifting dietary preferences and consumption patterns.