On 26 and 27 November 2013, the EMB held its second Members’ Meeting this year in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in Germany. At the meeting the European member organisations deliberated on how the political work was to proceed further following the reform of the EU Common Market Organisation and the big dairy farmers’ conference last September.

Although the results of the CAP reform that were recently adopted, rejecting instruments like the voluntary suspension of production, failed to come up to the European dairy farmers’ expectations, the representatives of the EMB member organisations at the meeting were agreed that the EMB had reached a crucial stage in its political work. This positive view was primarily due to the big dairy farmers’ conference in Brussels on 24 September, at which EU Commissioner for Agriculture Dacian Ciolos announced the introduction of a European monitoring agency for the milk market.

As the EMB sees it, what matters now is for this new institution to be given the requisite powers. On the one hand the EMB members want to work constructively together with the European Commission in this respect, but on the other hand to keep a close eye on it, in order to safeguard the interests of the European dairy farmers in Brussels. A guideline for how the monitoring agency ought to be made up in practice could be the academic study on a European monitoring agency commissioned by the EMB, presented by EMB President Romuald Schaber in Hamburg again to EMB members.

As at previous Members’ Meetings, once again friendly non-EMB European dairy farmer organisations were present as guests. The EMB members felt that the lively discussion with the dairy farmer representatives from Finland, Lithuania and Poland was beneficial on both the level of content and the human level, and that it once more underlined the importance of the intensive exchange of views between the European dairy farmer organisations.

To gear the quality of the EMB’s work in the future even more closely to its members’ needs, the plan is to conduct a survey early next year among EMB members on their satisfaction with the association’s work. A questionnaire is being drawn up for this purpose, to be presented at the next Members’ Meeting.

On the second day of the Members’ Meeting the highlight was a visit to a farm in Quarnstedt, Schleswig-Holstein, which included a lunch. The hot tasty soup with sausages was just what was needed to fend off the inclement November weather and start the journey home invigorated with a head full of new ideas for the EMB’s work to come.