Original article (in Serbian) was published on 28/11/2025; Author: Stefan Kosanović
A Serbian pro-government tabloid, Informer, claimed on Sunday that Croatia’s RTL had aired a segment asking “how Vučić managed” to make Serbia produce more milk than Croatia. But the Serbian president is not mentioned in the RTL report at all. The broadcaster simply cited Eurostat figures showing Serbia slightly ahead of Croatia in annual milk output – though both countries remain in the lower tier of the European ranking. Meanwhile, Serbia’s dairy sector is grappling with mounting difficulties at home. The government has again postponed harmonizing regulations with the EU’s stricter limits on aflatoxin, a move farmers say undermines food safety and export prospects. Producers have also been warning for months about falling farm-gate prices, stalled or selective purchasing, and alleged market manipulation—pressures that have driven some to dump unsold milk and take to the streets in protest.
“Shock on Croatia’s RTL – they’re whining at the top of their lungs: ‘How did Vučić pull this off?!’” reads the headline of a story published on the Informer portal.
Almost the entire text was lifted from a pro-government X (formerly Twitter) account called “Detektor laži” (“Lie Detector”) which claims that Croatian television aired a report stating Serbia produces as much as 190% more milk than Croatia.
Although such a segment did air on the Croatian TV channel, Serbia’s president is not mentioned in it, nor does the RTL journalist ask “how he managed to do it,” as Informer’s headline suggests.
RTL’s report notes that the number of cows in Croatia has halved, and that consumers are increasingly turning to imported milk, since domestic production covers only about 40% of demand. Serbia is mentioned in the context of the figure that it produced 190% more milk than Croatia.
In Informer’s version, that single sentence is turned into outright propaganda, with claims that “the Croats are wailing at the top of their lungs because the agricultural measures of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić have left Croatia far behind our country when it comes to milk production.”
But is everything in Serbia really that ideal when it comes to milk?
At the end of November, the Serbian government decided to postpone for another year the introduction of a stricter, lower limit for aflatoxin in milk. Instead of the new rules taking effect on December 1 this year, the deadline has been pushed back to the same date in 2026.
The new threshold would cap aflatoxin at 0.05 micrograms per kilogram – the European standard Serbia is meant to align with. Instead, the current limit remains in force, five times higher, at 0.25 micrograms per kilogram.
And a look at the Eurostat table from which RTL drew its annual milk-production figures shows that Serbia is not near the top, but closer to the bottom of the list. In a sample of 30 countries, Serbia ranks 21st.
Behind Serbia on the Eurostat list are the island states of Malta and Cyprus, followed by Croatia, Luxembourg and Slovenia — countries that are territorially far smaller. They are followed by Bulgaria, as well as Slovakia, Estonia and Latvia, whose output is comparable to Serbia’s but still lower.
All of these countries apply the standard allowing no more than 0.05 micrograms of aflatoxin per kilogram, which raises the question of whether their production would still trail Serbia’s if Serbia introduced the same, more stringent limit.
Serbia is outproduced by 20 countries, including some not usually seen as major milk producers, such as Lithuania, Finland and Portugal.
Milk dumping and farmers’ protests this year
That the situation in Serbia’s dairy sector is nowhere near as ideal as Informer implies is underscored by a string of farmers’ protests over the past years.
At the very start of this year, farmers in Bogatić staged a tractor convoy protest, warning that things were getting “worse day by day.”
They told N1 at the time that dairies had announced a cut in purchase prices due to massive imports, and said that talks they had held with the Agriculture Ministry in previous years had produced no results.
Some smaller, family-run farms hit early in the year by dairies halting collection were forced to pour out up to 850 liters of milk a day. Informer, for instance, did not ask then “how Vučić managed to pull it off.”
In early July, the Association of Cattle Breeders of Central Serbia announced it would dump three tons of milk in Gruža in protest over lower purchase prices, but later called off the action.
The group also pointed to a series of other problems facing small producers. The Agriculture Ministry said farmers had voiced serious concern that some dairies may be abusing their market position “through artificially reporting milk surpluses and inaccurate yield calculations – that is, the ratio between collected milk and the final products that appear on the market.”
