As milk prices continue to fall, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) president is calling on the European Commission to introduce a voluntary milk supply reduction scheme.

Denis Drennan said such a "tried and tested" measure will "put a floor under" falling farmer milk price.

He believes such a scheme would provide "badly needed support for farmer primary-producers in Ireland and right across the EU" as we approach the peak milk production period.

"With global supplies up 2.3% between January-November 2025 compared to -0.1% between January-November 2024 period, it’s very obvious that the global market is currently oversupplied," he said.

ICMSA

Drennan said that the "only person paying the price for this market turbulence is the dairy farmer".

"No-one else in the dairy sector, whether personally or as a business, is taking the kind of financial ‘hit’ that results from a milk price falling from over 50c/L to below 33c/L in some cases.

"We’ve heard a lot in recent days about the government’s commitment to Irish farming, but this is where that needs to translate to action: these kinds of price and income falls are not sustainable and are steadily undermining the farmer ‘link’ in our multi-billion Euro dairy sector," he said.

Mr Drennan said that in order to deliver "sustainable prices, global milk supplies need to come down"

"The over-supply is global, but the EU can – and should – be fixing what’s within its own power to fix; it should be doing what it can do ‘inside its own gate’.

"In 2016, the EU introduced an EU-wide Voluntary Reduction Scheme which provided a payment to individual farmers to voluntarily cut their milk supplies for a specified period.

"The scheme worked almost immediately by changing market sentiment and, critically, it provided dairy farmers with an option of either producing more, the same, or less milk in a market downturn," he said.

Milk reduction scheme

The ICMSA president said that the proposal would be "opposed by some elements".

"The essential point here is that support would have to be given at some stage and in some fashion and this voluntary reduction scheme had the merit of being practical, applicable at individual farm level and proven to ‘put a price floor’ under a falling market.

"The European Milk Board (EMB) is strongly advocating this solution to what is rapidly becoming a market collapse and the Irish government should throw its full weight behind an easy and affordable solution that will restore market balance in a speedy and transparent way," Drennan said.