by David Puchi
I recently read an article in a local newspaper regarding a subject we touched on in class; the milk market. There is a dairy farmer that wants to take away the use of labels indicating that certain milk is hormone free. For years, many dairy farmers have used cow hormones to increase productivity and profits. Only recently have people decided that hormones may not be so great in milk. What the people demand, the market supplies. People want to know what they’re drinking. If they’re trying to drink hormone-free milk, they should have the right to know if they are, in case they consider it harmful.
This is just an example of a dairy farmer that wants to make profit even at the disadvantage of consumers. He argues that hormone-free labels confuse costumers, for which he has no proof. Also he says the labeling is misleading and makes people think that milk without this label is inferior. The reality is that people want to know what they’re drinking and how to avoid what they don’t want. This dairy farmer doesn’t get it; he wants to keep producing milk and hiding from people what they want to know, possibly creating a negative externality the people are unaware of.
2 comments:
I think that they idea of drinking hormone free milk is more about animal rights than it is about what is being drank. Sure, there are people that will think that drinking milk from a hormone injected cow can be harmful, and i have no idea if it is or is not, but there are a lot more people fighting for animal rights these days than there were before, it's just not as vocal as it once was. It's kind of like buying uncaged eggs. These eggs are coming from chickens who also are hormone free and are kept in a more orthodox chicken coop instead of the very small cages that many other chicken farms are using. In case you haven't seen it, it is very sad. These caged chickens are crammed so tight that they can't even turn around and they spend their whole life this way. So, the hormone-free movement not only attracts consumers who are health conscience but also those who do not believe in the unnecessary mistreatment of animals, and that's a very smart move from an economical standpoint.
As wierd as this farmer is in this case there are in fact other people in the world that do crazier things. This is just another person in the economy that's trying to reach out to peopole that are demanding hormone free milk. But can this be harmful as well?
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