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... Butter mountains stage a comeback as farmers struggle to make ends meet From The Times January 23, 2009 The butter mountains and milk lakes that made Brussels a byword for waste and inefficiency are to make a return in response to plummeting world dairy prices. EU officials are to buy up and store 30,000 tonnes of butter and 109,000 tonnes of skimmed milk powder in the next few months as part of a series of moves agreed yesterday to use the EU budget to prop up European farmers. The U-turn, after several years of liberalising free trade policies, was criticised by producers around the world as a step back into the protectionism that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Fears were raised that new subsidies for a range of dairy products, combined with the new dairy mountains, will trigger a damaging spiral of tit-for-tat measures around the world. Brussels became synonymous with butter

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