TURBULENCE in world markets in most agricultural commodities looks set to continue in the future.

So says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which released a 10-year outlook this month.

In 2008, the global dairy market took the deepest hits from the global financial crisis of all major food commodities.

The volatile impacts on product and farmgate prices rattled the dairy supply chain.

Due to the strength of their political lobby in Europe and the US - exercised in different ways, politicians have been brought into the game.

The problem is regulation of dairy production and prices in the US and Europe hasn't served farmers by preventing exposure to volatility.

Now lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to work out what to do about this problem dairy child.

Six months ago the European Commission set up a leadership group to come up with some solutions to at least shelter their industry from uncertainty. The High-Level Group delivered recommendations last week.

The HLG's remedies have largely focused on the process by which milk prices to farmers are set.

It suggests a uniform contract structure and that farmer organisations are allowed to bargain on behalf of farmers.

It however clings to the past and says that the EU should retain "safety net" measures, leaving the door open it seems for the EU to buy surplus product out of the market and to even leave export subsidies in place - which the EU had already pledged in the World Trade Organisation to drop.

Meanwhile the EU will in 2015 remove production quotas which limit individual farmer output - a move that will create at least five years of turbulence.

In America, the Government has been taking ideas of how to make changes to a broken set of rules that tie regulated farmgate milk prices to the results from trading on a commodity exchange.

Farmers and processors agree there is a need for price-protection, but they are miles apart on whether supply should be managed with the support of regulation.

It's ironic - in the past the world market felt volatility due to the fallout from the application of various forms of farmer protection by these superpowers.

Our industry will watch developments carefully to ensure that devils in different forms aren't created from these bumbling processes.