Dairy farmers in Hungary placed the severed heads of 12 cows in front of the nation's Agriculture Ministry Thursday as part of what is a worldwide protest against low prices for milk producers. The farmers also dumped milk on the street and were promptly charged with defacing a public space. Farmers in the European Union, as in the rest of the world, are selling milk for considerably less than what it costs to produce. 

These kinds of protests and fights are happening all over the world, including Tasmania.  Here's a story from this week about a Pennsylvania family facing low milk prices.  Dairy herd buyouts have been held to try to reduce the herd in the U.S. in order to reduce milk supply. “The past year has been the most difficult since I began farming in 1973,” said Paul Toft, a Rice Lake, Wis., dairy farmer and president of the Associated Milk Producers Inc. “Some say these times rival those of the Great Depression.” 

What's bad for the producer on the farm, however, is good for the processor. Dean Foods Co. announced this week that its third quarter net income jumped 32% as the cost of milk declined. The company, the nation's largest dairy processor, increased its profit estimate for the full year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is looking into claims by U.S. farmers that a lack of competition in the milk market is keeping prices low. 

Justin Rowlatt is traveling the U.S. for the BBC network at the Ethical Man. He's been trying to cut his carbon emissions. Now he's back to "save the world" -- his words, not ours. He asks recently, "Can rural American hold the world to ransom?" 

Rowlatt is in West Virginia where he finds there is much coal mining. It's a place of poor people, but rich in the minerals that established America as an industrial power. Coal is king here and coal rules the state's politics. As a result, Rowlatt reports, the state's two Democratic senators will not vote for the climate change bill now pending in the Senate. The Democrats need those two votes to pass the bill and, as a result, Rowlatt writes, they will have to either cater to West Virginia or water down the bill in some other way that will attract a Republican or two.

"That, in turn, will dilute any deal done at Copenhagen," at the world climate change summit next month, Rowlatt writes. "It may seem extraordinary that a sparsely populated, rural state like West Virginia could hold such sway in international politics, but the logic here on the ground is compelling. 'What would you do if the mines closed?' I asked the miners. They shook their heads: There aren't any good jobs outside of coal here", they told me, 'West Virginia is coal.'"

R-CALF USA, the cattle producer group, has sent a letter to President Obama titled "A Desperate Call to Action from the U.S. Cattle Industry."  R-CALF (and a host of other cattle raiser groups) write, "While absolutely no one was watching, $6.4 billion has been stolen since Jan. 1, 2007, from the U.S. live cattle industry in the U.S. fed cattle market alone." The group says this estimate is based on USDA data showing consistent losses from the sale of 49 million head of cattle. The group says this amount was "stolen directly from the hands of the nation's 82,170 remaining cattle feeders and transferred into the hands of just a few mega-meatpackers, only four of which control over 85 percent of the fed cattle market in the nation's $50 billion live cattle industry."

R-CALF notes that while cattle producers have been losing money, meat prices for consumers have gone up and meatpackers have "prospered greatly." The result has been a decline in the number of independent cattle producers — and decreasing competition in the meat market.

Of the nearly three quarters of a million cattle operators, R-CALF writes: "Their numbers also are shrinking at an alarming rate, and Rural America is reeling from the consequential, rapid loss of its economic base. We may already have reached the point of no return: the point where it no longer matters if competition is restored because the industry may already lack the critical mass of independent cattle farmers and ranchers necessary to sustain a competitive industry."

The Obama administration is making a health care reform pitch to rural America today. It comes in the form of a report issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the former governor of Kansas. The report tells us that one in five Americans who are uninsured live in rural communities — which is to be expected, since one out of five Americans live in rural communities. 

Sebelius said in a conference call today that the "system we have really isn’t working for the 50 million” Americans who live in rural areas, she said, according to the Grand Forks Herald. “A lot of them are self-employed or work for family businesses, including family farms,” Sebelius said, and are disadvantaged by “not many choices and extremely high prices and rules that don’t protect consumers.” 

The Grand Forks paper wrote that the new report states that “millions of rural Americans have limited access to a primary health care provider,” and “with the recent economic downturn, there is potential for an increase in many of these health and access disparities that are already a problem in rural communities....There were only 55 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents in rural areas in 2005, compared with 72 per 100,000 in urban areas. The rate decreases to 36 per 100,000 in isolated, small rural areas. There are nursing shortages as well, with less than half as many nurses per capita in isolated rural sareas than in urban areas.”