Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

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Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
• Appropriate technical interventions, on-farm or post-farm, must be
supported by an enabling institutional environment marked by prosmallholder
policies, as well as a market structure ensuring fair prices.
• Smallholder dairy action plans, based on local context and people, are
required to transform the regional strategy into national action.
• The private sector must be fully engaged in developing the regional strategy
and putting the strategy into action at country level.
The strategy also notes that the smallholder dairy chain business model has been
less successful:
• where central plans are used;
• when governments intervene by establishing large dairy processing
enterprises managed by the public sector; and
• where low tariffs facilitated import of cheap commodities rather than
local milk.
It should however be noted that the impact of such interventions depends on their
timing and exit arrangements. If done for a specific purpose and duration and then
scrapped as soon as their objective is achieved they may have a positive effect.
The first three investments in integrated smallholder dairy value chains under
the strategy are underway in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand, funded by the
national governments, CFC, APHCA and FAO. The focus is on increasing income
of farming families and improving food security of both farming families and urban
consumers through environmentally-friendly dairying interventions: (i) profitable
cows, i.e. cows that make the most money for farmers – these are invariably not the
highest yielders; (ii) enhanced nutrition and market access; and (iii) enabling policy
environments, including the upgrading of national dairy training centres and setting
up regional training at Chiang Mai in Thailand (Dugdill, 2004).
Latin America
The dairy sector in Latin America used to be based on dual-purpose cows because
meat production was the primary aim, but this is changing, particularly in Argentina,
Brazil and Chile where adoption of specialized dairy breeds has raised milk
output over the past two decades.
Cattle producers in Latin America and the Caribbean traditionally organized
themselves in associations emphasizing meat production. Except for in Uruguay,
where the dairy industry has a tradition in cooperative dairying with an export
orientation, the role of milk producers’ organizations was limited.
There are dairy cooperatives in El Salvador and Honduras but they depend on
government assistance. The Dominican Republic and Ecuador have strong support
systems for milk producers based on donor assistance. The dairy industries
in Argentina and Brazil are large and complex, with a strong private sector and
relatively weak producer groups. In Chile some cooperative milk collection schemes
exist, and a few small groups of large producers bargain collectively with multinational
processors. In Mexico, where the government regulates prices and subsidizes
milk schemes, some vertically integrated producer groups supply cities, but rural
smallholders are poorly organized.