Can it be right that milk costs less than water, Coca-Cola or Red Bull?

The Robinsons Fruit Shoot recall at Britvic is a crisis. Of that there is no doubt, as Britvic revised the costs from last week’s minimum forecast of £1m to this week’s maximum limit of £25m.

And as if wiping out one fifth of Britvic’s total global profits wasn’t enough, it never rains but it pours, as they say, with the appalling summer simultaneously forcing the soft drinks plc to revise Q3 sales and profits guidance downwards.

But the Fruit Shoot recall is not a tragedy. No-one died, luckily. The young boy who choked on one of the new ‘magic cap’ bottles, must have been scared, and might have been offended - his child minder reportedly turned down a trip to a theme park that Britvic offered by way of apology - but he will have no scars like the ones I saw on a six-year-old I once interviewed, who suffered third degree burns all over his body due to an electrical fault in his mother’s car.

That’s tragic. And so is the situation, potentially, for dairy farmers. With the price paid for milk now 5p lower than the cost of production, there will be many more suicides before the 20th anniversary of the scrapping of the Milk Marketing Board next year. One can argue about this week’s shouty dairy summit exchanges in London, and the calls for processors to reverse cuts by 1 August, as if the milk price war, and the collapse in the price of bulk cream, were figments of their imagination - but threatening to disrupt the Olympics or pouring milk down the drain reflects how desperate the situation is.

Who to blame?
The quality of the product, the sophistication of its supply chain, and its importance to the nation’s health makes dairy one of Britain’s most hallowed industries. The question is, who is to blame for the mess? As unsatisfying as it sounds, every part of the supply chain is culpable to some degree.

Much attention has - rightly - focused on the supermarkets. With their size and market share, they are in a key position of power and responsibility, with opportunities to shape shoppers’ perceptions of the value of our food. Can it be right, for example, that for as little as 24.75p per pint, milk costs less than a pint of water (around 50p) or Coca-Cola (£1.20) or Red Bull (£2.40)?

And with farmers quick to praise the cost-of-production models employed by the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S and Waitrose, the retailers who aren’t using comparable models - including Asda, Morrisons and The Co-op - will find it increasingly difficult to justify why they are not protecting farmers in the same way: even a premium is meaningless if it’s still below the cost of production.

But if there’s to be a solution it needs to extend beyond the big four. discounters such as Iceland, Aldi and Lidl have been the real trailblazers, when it comes to pricing - it was their success through heavy discounting on milk that arguably prompted Asda to start the milk price war two years ago.

And what about those other major milk buyers - the foodservice sector, the government and public institutions such as schools, prisons and hospitals? This week, Jim Paice embarrassed himself by not knowing the price of a pint in the shops - so I don’t suppose he knows how much farmers make on the milk bought by government departments.

But these are questions we need answers to, and fast. Before another tragedy occurs.