Kerala Milk Marketing Federation (Milma) has decided to resume milk procurement from cooperatives without any restrictions from Friday, April 3.
This is following the Tamil Nadu Cooperative Milk Producers' Federation (Aavin) and Telangana State based Dodla Dairy’s decision to convert the excess milk procured by Milma into powder.
Milma has been loaded with an excess of 1,80,000 litres of milk every day due to the decline in demand owing to the lockdown. It was the Malabar Regional Cooperative Milk Producers' Union that mainly experienced the surplus.
Initially, Tamil Nadu was reluctant to let in milk consignments from Kerala owing to the COVID-19 fears that in turn forced Milma to stop procurement in the Malabar region.
Malayalam television channels had aired visuals of dairy farmers spilling milk onto the streets in protest.
According to a report in The New Indian Express, Milma Chairman PA Balan has said that Aavin has agreed to convert 50,000 litres of milk into powder while Dodla Dairy will convert one lakh liners at its plant in Andhra Pradesh and 30,000 litres at the Dingula plant.
The current scenario is in sharp contrast to what the state was experiencing a month ago.
The annual summer-time shortage of milk in the state had snowballed into a crisis even as neighbouring Tamil Nadu stopped supplying milk to the state.
Following a communication from Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to his Tamil Nadu counterpart Edappadi K Palaniswami, it was decided that Tamil Nadu would supply 1.5 lakh litres of milk per day to Kerala.
The per day production of milk in Kerala, as per Milma numbers, ranges between 11.5 and 12 litres per day while the consumption is 13.5 lakh litres. There are three regional cooperative milk producers’ unions under Milma— Thiruvananthapuram, Malabar and Ernakulam. The three unions together procure milk from 673 societies across the state.