8-26 IAN Gov. & Dairy

 Jerry Slominski is the International Dairy Foods Association senior vice president for legislative affairs and economic policy. I have had a number of discussions with Jerry  because he has a highly informed perspective on Capitol Hill  as it relates to  the dairy  industry.  He recently was listing off programs describing interactions between Idaho dairyman and the people on Capitol Hill. “Another program that has been popular at USDA is called livestock gross management dairy and that is essentially a risk management program that uses the futures markets as a way of hedging prices. You can buy insurance based upon that, that’s a program that we think should be expanded, money should be put into it by the federal government to make it more available to dairy farmers and this combination of risk management tools, we think is much better than having the government attempt to regulate risk.  The irony in what I observed is that I believe what you are saying is that you want to keep government out of policymaking but you are lobbying government  in order to do that. In a way yes. We understand and do not fight the notion there are some support programs for dairy farmers that make sense. So what we want to do is support those programs that have minimal interference in dairy markets, those kind of programs that do not take us out of the export markets, that interferes least with those, so we are trying to push the policy debate towards those kinds of programs and away from programs like growth management programs that manipulate prices with a whole new set of government regulations that we think will be harmful to the very industry overall.”