Last month's parliamentary environment and food select committee report followed growing pressure for EU and UK policymakers to ensure better returns for producers, who gained just 5% last year despite world dairy commodity prices strengthening by 31%, according to latest figures from DairyCo.

The levy body followed its annual Supply Chain Margins Report with a new study of "asymmetric" price patterns over the past 20 years, which pointed to a fundamentally flawed market that had robbed farmers of their fair share of price increases.

The results were the ammunition farmers had been waiting for, according to DairyCo chairman Tim Bennett. "While [the Asymmetric Price Transmission Report] quite clearly shows the market has not been working for the dairy farmer, it's not been good for processors, either," he said.

He insisted: "None of these reports should be used to play the blame game."

If anything, stronger alliances were needed between producers and processors, who saw gross margins on liquid milk squeezed by 9% last year, thanks to retail discounting. Supermarkets, meanwhile, sacrificed just 1% as the price of milk at the tills plummeted to 56ppl from 61.7ppl.

DairyCo, which described current contracts as a 'licence to supply', gave a massive steer to policymakers to review the terms and conditions something likely to be strongly opposed by processors' trade body Dairy UK.

Director general Jim Begg said: "We obviously support the right of farmers to have a contract. But they should not be regulated.