Dairy giants accused of monopoly
Addison County Independent
5/2010
Dairy farmers in the Northeast are training their sights on the massive Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) co-op and processing giant Dean Foods in an effort to prove that price fixing and illegal monopolization of the dairy industry has kept milk prices artificially low for struggling producers.
These farmers’ action represents the latest in a series of lawsuits around the country alleging that a lack of competition in the dairy processing industry has resulted in record profits for milk processors at the cost of lower prices for farmers.
Lawyers from Burlington firm Gravel and Shea alongside the Washington, D.C.-based Cohen Milstein firm were slated to make the case for the antitrust class-action suit against four milk processors — DFA, Dean Foods, Dairy Marketing Services (DMS) and HP Hood — in a hearing in U.S. District Court in Burlington on May 6. The defendants are pushing a motion to dismiss the case altogether.
Earlier this month a federal judge in Milwaukee denied a similar motion to dismiss and let the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Dean Foods in the Midwest move forward. Meanwhile, lawyers are slogging ahead in the Southeast to make the case, as they will attempt to do in Burlington, that a conspiracy is afoot to fix prices and monopolize the dairy industry.
“We think there’s a lack of competition. The defendants have conspired to give you fewer options, because they want lower prices,” D.C.-based lawyer Benjamin Brown told dairy farmers in Middlebury last week in a briefing about the case. “The industry has changed. We think it changed on purpose.”
Brown, a law partner with Cohen Milstein, was on hand in Middlebury last week, along with lawyers from the D.C.-based Howrey antitrust law firm, to meet with dairy farmers to discuss the ongoing case in the South as well as the state of the milk industry in the Northeast.