Environment – The price of milk 

In the US, milk is sometimes associated with white supremacy. It’s to do with ideas of purity, domination and the supposed superiority of those who can tolerate lactose in their diets. That may seem bizarre to us, but even here, milk expresses power.

To animal rights advocates, milk comes from human supremacy over cows – a political act of domination. They also say humans shouldn’t drink cow milk because we aren’t calves. Modern milk production is cruel and exploitive because it requires a continual cycle of pregnancies, cow-calf separation within days of birth, cows treated like milk machines and millions of unwanted bobby calves killed each year.

To environmentalists, New Zealand’s milk production economic model is unsustainable and unethical. Herd sizes are boosted beyond the land’s carrying capacity by supplementary feeding using a palm kernel extract linked to deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. Our massive milk production processes lead to nitrous oxide in the air causing climate change. Polluting nitrates destroy fresh water ecology, and when present in drinking water lead to public health concerns. Recent news reports said high nitrate levels increase cancers and premature births.

For human rights activists, milk is implicated in the colonisation and repression of communities around the world. Demand for fertiliser such as phosphate (white gold) has led to landlessness and poverty in islands and continents.
Critical international theory says mega-dairy corporations like Fonterra threaten livelihoods, health, self-sufficiency, sovereignty and the way of life for small-scale dairy producers around the world. Large intensive farms and corporations with economies of scale can capture local and global markets, set prices, anticipate and meet higher regulatory standards and drive independent producers out of business.

About 96 per cent of New Zealand’s 21.79 million metric tonnes of milk produced is exported. Dairying contributed $20 billion export revenue to the NZ economy and kept the foreign exchange coming in 2020, while other exports collapsed from Covid-19. New Zealanders consumed 525,000 tonnes of milk last year. About 190 two-litre milk bottles in NZ supermarkets are sold every minute. We have one of the highest per capita consumption rates of fresh milk in the world. Milk production is increasing. We have among the world’s top 10 highest milk production and herd sizes, despite our small land mass. Around 40,000 people are in dairy-related work.

Milk is ingrained in our culture. It is used in many foods and in almost every meal in some form or another. If you question the saturation of milk in our diets, lives, economy and culture, you are verging on treason. Many people choose not to question our use of land, cows and the impacts on rivers and our health from our dependence on dairy. I don’t drink milk because of the animal and environmental impacts, and because I’m lactose intolerant, too.