Recently, residents of the Kirovograd region are increasingly complaining about home-made dairy products purchased on the market. Supervisory authorities register a wide arsenal of additives from sellers “chemists”: washing powder, antibiotics, soda, starch, water.
In a situation where the number of cattle is reduced, as well as the number of pastures, heifers of cottage cheese rise in the country's markets and milk rivers flow. This pattern persists even in winter, when cows usually stop milking.
Homemade dairy products have always been considered better and more natural. Now the situation has changed not for the better. The consumer is faced with a choice: to buy a store product, albeit not so natural, but flavored with non-prohibited substances, or to purchase goods on the market, completely relying on the seller’s conscience.
And enterprising peasants and resellers of which just do not add to the dairy product. Water has traditionally helped increase product volume. She is the most harmless supplement. Soda is poured into milk so that it is stored longer. This is also not very scary. It is worse when ammonia and antibiotics, in particular, chloramphenicol, added for the same purpose, get into milk. To sell more homemade cottage cheese, it is mixed with cheap cheese mass. It turns out very profitable, but only for the seller.
Among farmers there are many decent people. But they can’t always find the time to sell their product on the market themselves. Farmers Valery and Olga Unrainy from the village of Lozovatki, Kropyvnytskyi district, come to the buyers themselves in order not to give the products to wholesalers at a low price. But more often than not, homemade “milk” gets to resellers who practice chemical experiments.
In 2018, the dairy industry produced products worth 30 billion UAH. In the shadow sector, products worth UAH 9 billion were manufactured. Are there any prospects for the country's dairy industry? Of course, you only need to remove this shadow business, says the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Union of Dairy Enterprises of Ukraine Vadim Chagarovsky.
