Volume 12: Livestock Farming
3. Promotion and marketing of dairy and beef products
Introduction

3.1 Agricultural goods have traditionally been sold by individuals, private traders and producers' cooperatives. In addition, from the late 1930s to the late 1960s, statutory arrangements were used to foster effective production and marketing techniques and to promote sales of specific types of agricultural product. Under these arrangements the Milk Marketing Boards and the MLC were created and given powers with respect to cattle products. Such statutory arrangements provide another example of the long-standing partnership between government and the farming industry.

3.2 At the time BSE emerged there were five Milk Marketing Boards, which were producers' organisations (each including a minority of independent members appointed by Agriculture Ministers) with statutory powers to buy from producers. This chapter looks at the Boards' functions and at changes during the 1990s which led to their abolition by 1995.

3.3 The chapter also outlines the MLC's functions in relation to livestock farming. The MLC's responsibilities in relation to human and animal health are discussed in vol. 14: Responsibilities for Human and Animal Health. The active role it played throughout the BSE story, mainly in the field of marketing beef products, and the views it offered to government on a number of aspects of handling BSE, are covered in vol. 5: Animal Health, 1989-96 and vol. 6: Human Health, 1989-96. The roleof the MLC and Milk Marketing Boards in livestock improvement is looked at in Chapter 5.

3.4 The chapter concludes with a brief review of recent developments between producers and retailers in beef marketing.