Milk Price Hike: Consumers Need to Take Initiative

The milk price is generally expected to keep rising in the coming time. Mr Do Gia Phan, Deputy Chairman and General Secretary of the Vietnam Standards and Consumers Association (VINASTAS), talked with the press about this matter:

 

The new price rise in milk products will probably continue because the milk price on the global market has already gone up 70 per cent. The Vietnamese market relies on the world market, because a majority of famous milk brands for children and elderly people are imported.

 

Adjusting the milk price on the market is out of the authority of State management organs. The price is decided by supply-demand laws. Our association’s only function is mobilising and publicizing, via the mass media and newspapers, to help consumers and trading companies to choose suitable, good products. Consumers should take note of domestic milk products with similar quality to foreign ones to save costs, ensure sufficient nutrition and encourage domestic production and quality improvement.

 

Currently, on television and in advertisement papers, Dumex says “Dumex Gold with Prebiotics compound, certified international patent, helping children’s digestive systems develop healthily with no constipation, and making stool samples as good as breastfed by mother milk.” This advertisement is a violation of the Vietnamese law banning “advertising milk in any form in comparison with mother’s milk”. This negatively impacts the psychology of mothers in pregnancy and breastfeeding. This will subsequently make mothers abuse powdered milk and abandon mother’s milk and the importance of other milk for infants. This is contradictory to the traditional ethics of Vietnamese people.

On television, Vinamilk is advertising 100 per cent original milk,but it is in fact writing 95 per cent on the milk packages. And with this seductive advertisement, many Vietnamese children only want to drink 100 per cent original Vinamilk. So, is Vinamilk cheating consumers? This will be considered by competent bodies.

 

I hope consumers keep calm when receiving such information, because consumer actions play a decisive role in price movement. In fact, at present, the Vietnamese people prefer foreign-branded products to local ones, although they may not fully understand the quality of specific milk products. For example, domestic milk labelled 100 per cent original is sold at VND100,000 while foreign milk also labelled 100 per cent original is priced at VND200,000. Vietnamese consumers will surely think that foreign products are much more nutritious. This is a limitation of Vietnamese consumers, and is a weak point some milk companies take advantage of, increasing the price to deceive consumers.