The International Dairy Federation (IDF) released its "World Dairy Situation 2018" report during the IDF World Dairy Summit last week in Daejeon, South Korea. The report reviews the state of the global dairy industry, covering milk production, processing, trade, pricing and consumption in more than 50 dairy producing countries. IDF publishes the report annually to further the understanding of dairy’s macro supply-and-demand trends and the policy and economic factors that influence them.

According to IDF, the main findings of the report are:

• Key export regions like Oceania, the United States and the European Union will see their cheese production grow in years to come as to keep up with accelerating import demand in Asia. China, Korea and Japan will be important destinations.
• There was greater import demand by China last year due to a shortfall in milk production. The demand growth is in ultra-high temperature pasteurized milk, mozzarella and cream cheese.
• Milkfat-driven recovery of the market resulted in profitable milk prices throughout most of 2017, propelling above-average milk production growth last year. The strongest growth was recorded in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Australia, Poland and the United Kingdom.

The report is available for purchase at the IDF website. View a short preview of the report here. 

For more information contact Cary Frye, IDFA senior vice president of regulatory affairs, at cfrye@idfa.org.