Agriculture, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Legislation, Markets and Companies

"This is the final figure following declarations from all dairy farms, which had to be submitted by May 15. The result confirms that a levy will be evaded, just as we had hoped it would," said Galvanovska.

She added that Lithuania would also avoid paying a levy, whereas Estonia would have to pay a fine of approximately EUR 2 million, as the country's quota was exceeded by 1%.

According to the European Union's regulations, farmers will have to continue provide data about dairy produce for three more years, said Galvanovska.

"The regulations on submitting the relevant data to the Agricultural Data Center are still in force, for producers and customers both. All the documents have to be kept for another three years, because an audit by the European Commission may come any time, which may be followed by a fine that the state will have to pay if the data are incorrect. This is what has already happened in Lithuania that received a fine of about EUR 0.5 million. The Commission's inspectors have not been to Latvia since 2004, so an audit is entirely possible," said Galvanovska.

As reported, the EU milk quotas were scrapped as of March 31 after more than three decades of efforts to prevent overproduction.

The annual quota period began on April 1, 2014, and ended on March 31 this year. The remaining amount of milk quota for Latvia was 781,132 tons. Back in January yet, data were suggesting that Latvia could exceed its milk quota by about 1%, which would entail a fine of more than EUR 2 million. At the beginning of this past April, Agriculture Minister Janis Duklavs (Greens/Farmers) said that Latvia had exhausted 99.1% of its annual quota.