"Psst! Over here! Listen to what these guys are up to." If you listen carefully, you can hear Bob Odom, Louisiana Agricultural Commissioner, helping Louisiana dairy farmers to conspire with the dairy farmers in 14 other Southern states to fix the price of milk above the price already fixed in Washington. Of course, Commissioner Odom and the dairy farmers only whisper this plan, so as not to arouse much opposition.

This "conspiracy" to raise milk prices is far from illegal, however, because the anti-trust statutes specifically exempt agriculture and labor. Besides, their proposal will have to first be approved by legislatures in the affected states and then by Congress. But if its wrong for baby formula companies to fix prices, why is it OK for farmers?

In New England, dairy farmers have already taken this sort of regional approach to setting milk prices, setting prices at $3 per hundredweight higher than the already federally set price (the price farmers get is based on weight).

Southern dairies do have problems that warrant concerns. In Louisiana, for instance, we have fewer than sixty percent of the dairies we had in 1980. Summer temperatures in the South stress cows so much that they eat less and produce about 40% less milk than they do in the spring and fall. Despite these problems, total annual milk production in Louisiana has remained about the same as it was in 1980, due to efficiencies of larger dairies.

In the summer, the shortfall in milk production in the South is made up by shipments of milk from Northern states. The grocers' milk prices are only slightly higher in the summer because of transportation costs.

While higher prices will be a boon to the 580 Louisiana dairy farmers, it will be financed by the equivalent of a tax on the millions of milk consumers in the state. In a New Orleans Times-Picayune (p. B-3, 7/5/97) article on the Southern dairy price fixing, Commissioner Odom says, "I don't see it affecting the price of the consumer." His doubt about the effect on consumer prices is either wishful thinking or just his political spin. Just as transportation costs get passed on to milk consumers for milk shipped in during the summer, prices paid by consumers will certainly go up as a result of an increase in the price paid to farmers.

If the price hike by Southern dairy farmers is similar to the New England price hike, the price hike consumers face will only be about 15 to 30 cents per gallon. Even if you look at the cost to a normal family that consumes, say, 2 gallons of milk per week, the price increase amounts to about $15 to $30 per year, not a lot of money.

This probably will not be enough of family budget buster to get consumers to write Commissioner Odom, or legislators and congressmen, to voice their opinions and to organize protests against this price-fixing scheme. But the thousands of dollars per year for each farmer is surely enough to get them to work very hard to get this scheme approved by the states and by Congress.

Still, the equivalent of a $15 to $30 tax per year on poor families and wealthy families alike seems like questionable public policy. And the justification for this policy is to keep several farmers at their favorite job, instead of allowing farms to grow larger and more efficient and to purchase the less efficient farms.

Between 1950 and 1970, more than half of the grocery stores in the country closed down because supermarkets were able to provide customers with a better deal. Now, smaller dairies are closing down because larger, more efficient dairies are offering better deals to processors, and ultimately, to consumers. To tax milk consumers, and particularly, the poorer milk consumers of this state in order to protect the inefficient is hard to justify.

But Odom and the dairy farmers in this state and throughout the South need not justify a thing. This proposal, as with so much of special-interest politics, will benefit a few by a lot, but will cost each consumer very little. The special-interest group stands to gain a lot, and they speak up for themselves. The rest of us, who lose out in the process because each special-interest proposal will cost us a little, stand by in silence, and we get taken again and again, like easy marks. And we suffer "a death by a thousand cuts."