PRODUCCIÓN PORCINA

There are 13.5 million breeding sowsin the EU-27 producing 22 million tonnes of pig meat from just over 248 million finished pigs (Eurostat, 2010). Germany is by far the largest producer, followed by Spain (Figure 1).

Animal welfare is an increasingly important factor in the purchasing decisions of consumers (Napolitano et al., 2010), sustained despite the prevailing recession (IGD, 2011). Recent surveys indicated almost half of UK consumers surveyed rated animal welfare as either ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’ (IGD, 2011), whilst 76% (Defra, 2011) and 85% (Clonan et al., 2010) rated welfare as ‘an important’ issue. In fact, farm animal welfare was rated the single most important sustainability related food issue for British consumers (IGD, 2011; Defra, 2011), above health or safety concerns. Over 70% of U.S citizens surveyed also reported ‘concern’ forfarm animal welfare (Norwood and Lusk, 2011a). Pigs were identified amongst the three animal systems most in need of animal welfare improvements by EU citizens (European Commission, 2005).

The Food Business team has recently produced comprehensive tables comparing various welfare schemes with Compassion’s criteria for higher animal welfare.

Compassion analysed 34 initiatives, across 10 countries and 4 species (broiler chickens, laying hens, sows and meat pigs and dairy cows and calves) to understand which ones meet Compassion’s criteria for higher animal welfare.

Click here to read the comparison table for sows and meat pigs.

A summary of why multi-storey pig farms in China are not suitable productions systems for pigs.