Member States have agreed to extend private storage aid for butter & SMP until February 28, 2015 at the Management Committee held in Brussels last week.

The UK abstained on the vote.

An implementing regulation to be adopted by the Commission in the coming days. This is welcome as it offers a better safety net to the market, and at least gives some signal that the EU will support the dairy market. ICOS will continue to lobby to get this further extended to ensure we can use the scheme as we go towards our production peak in Ireland.

Much to our protestations in ICOS, the Commission closed the system of PSA for cheese at the end of September after the Italians put over 70,000 tons of high quality cheese from regions that are not traditionally exporting significant quantities to Russia.

Regarding the public intervention for butter & SMP regulation in the new CAP, thankfully, the market instrument has yet to be used but will now be open for use from January to October.

The Commission is also to adopt a delegated regulation to advance the period by 2 months (January & February) in the coming weeks.

Again ICOS welcomes this change which we worked for, and is another small signal that the Commission will act to stabilise the market.

Regarding the current operation of market tools, figures show just over 20,500 tons of butter and 14,330 tons of SMP have been taken off the market and put into private storage since the measures’ entry into force at the beginning of Sept.

From a butter perspective, we are leading the way with 8,014t in PSA, followed by the Netherlands (7,229t), Belgium (2,976t) and Germany (1,260t).

At present we are not big users of the SMP option with the bulk of the total of 14,330 tons is stored in Germany (8,505t).

At present while intervention is open, it remains unused since the current scheme opened on September 1st.

While the dairy market is well back on last year, recent figures from the commission are showing a level of stability for butter, SMP, gouda & cheddar.