Understanding opposition to raw milk

This is excerpted from Kimberly Hartke’s fine blog:

Speaker and author David E. Gumpert, at WAPF conference. Photo: Anne-Marie Michaels of the "Cheeselave" blog

“The keynote speaker at the recent International Wise Traditions 2009 Conference, held in the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, was David Gumpert, journalist and creator of The Complete Patient blog.

David writes for Business Week, major daily newspapers and is an award winning author. His brand new book, Raw Milk Revolution—the Emerging Battle over America’s Food Rights was the topic of his address to 1300 attendees of the conference. He travels the country interviewing regulators, farmers and raw milk aficionados, and has spent the last year of his life writing this book.

He soberly told us that all the farms that the work of Sally Fallon Morell and her Weston A. Price Foundation members have saved, are now under attack.

What follows is his speech [my comments in brackets]:

Slagging Dairy Supply Management

In the opinion piece from the National Post excerpted below, Terrence Corcoran implies that consumers are being shafted by the government intransigence in continuing to support supply management — i.e. the quota system for milk production — in the face of demands from World Trade Organization members who would like to see our markets opened to foreign imports.

National Post photo by Aaron Lynett

However, Canadian dairy farmers are still making a decent living while U.S. dairy farmers have been operating at a substantial loss for something like a year now. Supply management is what makes that difference. How much longer will American dairy farmers be able to keep operating before the economics of their situation forces many of them to shut down production?

What will Americans drink then? “Dairy Drink” made with imported Chinese milk protein concentrate? Or ultra-pasteurized milk imported from the massive-scale dairy farms of South America?