Representatives of KPH (Koperattiva Produtturi Halib) (Cooperative of milk producers) met with Alfred Sant on Saturday in Victoria, to discuss “a new crisis that is hitting the dairy industry.”

Joseph Debrincat and Joseph Spiteri, representatives of Gozitan dairy farmers explained that the dairy industry was being faced with new regulations coming from Europe that prohibited the spread of animal slurry on fields which had just been harvested.

“Yet over the past ten years dairy farmers had been made to invest in plant and technical equipment intended to store animal waste as slurry over the winter period for use as surface slurry to fertilise fields,” Debrincat and Spiteri said.

They said that the “older methods of harvesting animal waste were no longer available and to conform with the new regulations on slurry and dairy farmers have no way by which to fertilise their fields and dispose of the accumulated slurry.”

“Yet the authorities are telling them that Malta faced the payment of new penalties unless the new regulations were implemented,” they said.

Alfred Sant accepted that local dairy farmers were facing a very big problem and said that “this was being caused by the ineffectual ways by which EU regulations had been transplanted to Malta over the past ten years. He promised full support to dairy farmers in future.”

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