Image caption Farmers used a platform to hose the European Parliament with milk 
 
 Angry farmers protesting at falling dairy prices in the EU have sprayed fresh milk at the European Parliament and riot police in Brussels. It's very simple: you can't live off milk any more Leopold Gruget , French farmer In pictures: Dairy farmers' protest 
 
 The European Milk Board (EMB), which is co-ordinating the protest, says small farmers are being forced out of business. In Belgium, for example, the wholesale price for a litre of milk is 0.26 euros (£0.21; $0.34) but the cost of producing it is 0.40 euros, the board said. The EU is the world's largest milk producer and spends more than 40 percent of its annual 130 billion euro budget paying subsidies and other forms of financial support to farmers, including those in the diary industry. They then turned their hoses on parliament, a collection of vast marble, glass and steel buildings on a Brussels square, and unleashed torrents of milk, some of it raining down on police and passers-by. Image caption The burning trailer sent a plume of smoke into the air 
 
 A trailer of hay was set alight on the nearby Place du Luxembourg, where a mock gallows was erected with what appeared to be a hanging dummy of a farmer. Some of the largest farmers' contingents have come from Denmark, France, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, the EU Observer reports.
– Thousands of enraged dairy farmers converged on the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday, and sprayed the building, and the cops who showed up to contain them, with their stock in trade: milk. The protesters arrived on tractors, blocked traffic along many of the city's main streets, then pulled out hoses and let thousands of liters of the white stuff fly, Reuters reports. They also set fire to a trailer full of hay, and hung a nondescript body in effigy. The farmers are demanding a 25% bump in milk prices, which they say have become untenably low, the BBC reports; In Belgium, for instance, a liter sells for about $0.34 wholesale, but costs about $0.52 to produce. Part of the problem: the EU sets an annual quota of about 143 tons of milk, more than Europe can consume. "It's very simple: you can't live off milk anymore," one French farmer said. "If I go on, it's thanks to European aid."