National Milk Producers Federation Addresses Formula Shortage
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
Well, shortages of infant formula on store shelves here in the United States has Washington, D.C. working to help fill the void. We first started seeing these shortages this spring following the shutdown of an Abbott facility in Michigan over safety concerns. Shawna Morris, National Milk Producers Federation Senior Vice President of Trade Policy. She says it’s a matter of supply for produced formula, not milk ingredients…
“Fundamentally American families are facing this awful and heartbreaking shortage of product where parents are scrambling to find food to feed their babies because we saw a major U.S. facility very suddenly go offline, in terms of producing those products, and then unfortunately, remain offline in terms of lack of production for an extended period of time. We really don't have a gap here on the input side. So the inputs, the milk, the ingredients, that the plant would need in order to produce formula, no challenge there. Instead, what we have is a problem more on the processing capacity piece.”
She does say that imports can play a role in bridging the supply gaps that we currently have. But the best way, she says, to fix the issue is to get that plant back online and producing safe formula products. Again Shawna Morris with the National Milk Producers Federation.
