Poland's pig sector in need for cooperation - IAFE-NRI report
In the last years, the sector has been shrinking by 40 percent, turning the country into a net importer of pork, according to Pig Progress magazine.
A report of the Poland-based Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics-National Research Institute (IAFE-NRI) commissioned by the Netherlands agricultural counselor for Poland concluded that the level of cooperation is far from optimal.
Small farms
A lack of consolidation in the Polish pig business is one of the main causes for the decline, according to IAFE-NRI analysis. On average, a pig farm has 45 pigs. Over 50% of all Polish farms have fewer than 20 pigs. The country’s pig inventory has been shrinking by 40% since 2000. With a 10.2 million pigs on 280,000 farms, by the end of 2016, the sowing process is now applied to almost 800,000 animals, a number that shows a decline by half from 2000 until now.
Despite a strong consumption of pork, the businesses are not thriving as a disorganized structure is pulling back the expansion of this sector.
Room for improvement
Domestic annual consumption of pork stands at 41kg per capita but the disarray chain in this sector has taken its toll, Poland's self-sufficiency rate dropped from 110% in 2000 to 91% in 2016. 200,000 tonnes of pork are annually imported to cover the domestic consumption.
The report statues that Poland has sufficient land to grow pigs and both slaughter, as well as processing capacities, are present to a large extent. The main challenge is to improve its efficiency by setting up production chains in order to allow individual players to work more closely together.
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