Subsidy for one litre of milk should become 0.2 leva. On top of this, there should be support for feeding animals during the winter months.
This, milk and dairy producers from south-east Bulgaria demanded on October 21 in a declaration sent to the Agriculture Ministry.

From an allocated 9 million leva, milk and dairy producers have received 0.13 leva per litre in subsidy during the spring and summer when the costs of feeding the animals were much lower, mediapool.bg said.

Producers proposed an subsidy for each cow for up to 25 litres of produced milk per day, so that abuse of the subsidy would be avoided.

They demanded support in the form of 500 kg of grain per year for a cow, 300 kg for a young cow and 50 kg for a sheep. This was one third of the quantities these animals needed, producers said.

The price at which milk was bought from producers was lower than the cost-price. As a result, farmers would go bankrupt and slaughter animals, the producers said.

The chairman of the National Milk Board (NMB) Dimitur Zorov said the prices from producers had reached average European levels, but the quality was not European.

Therefor, he said, in Bulgaria there were two kinds of dairy products, low quality for local consumption and high quality for export.

Producers' prices of milk had reached 0.60 leva on average for the country, while only in the past month the price had risen with 10 stotinki.
One of the reasons for the rise in prices had been a scarcity in milk. At the moment the price had stabilised.

The NMB said the Agriculture Ministry was to blame for the chaos in the branch.