CUMBRIAN dairy farmers are still receiving only ten pence per pint for their milk despite a ten-year high in world commodity prices.

Members of the county's NFU Milk Working Group have expressed dismay that the continuing unwillingness of UK processors to provide a fair return for farmers.

With commodity prices at their highest level for a decade and British milk production at an eight-year low, some British dairy farmers are still being paid as little as one quarter of the retail price for a pint of milk.

Mike Taylor, Cumbria NFU's delegate to the organisation's National Milk and

Dairy Produce Committee, commented: "Processors are making profits of between five per cent and five per cent of their total turnover while most dairy farmers are still being forced to sell their milk for prices below the cost of production."

"This leads Cumbria NFU working group to conclude that direct selling does not work and that dairy farmers must come together to form bigger milk groups and turn themselves into farmer-owned businesses.

Only this way will we regain the bargaining power which, as individual farmers, we have lost."

l Mr Taylor's comment come only a few days after John Loftus, chairman of the Federation of Milk Groups, told the meeting of Cumbrian dairy farmers at the Shap Wells hotel that the only way to offset the market power of the big multiple retailers was to organise themselves into co-operative ventures to wrest back some bargaining power.

Mr Loftus urged dairy farmers to join the FMG campaign for greater co-operation in the industry to get a fairer share of the milk price.

He was backed by Andrew Cookson, from research company Girag, who showed that, not only were continental co-ops huge in comparison to their British counterparts, but they also tended to have production capacity.

Mr Cookson also concluded that the British dairy farmers would have to organise themselves into large and powerful co-operatives if they were to get into profit in the future.