ASSICA and Salumitalia express their satisfaction with the European Commission’s Communication on the new European Union strategy for livestock farming, which contributes to restoring dignity and centrality to the animal products sector.
The organizations welcome the European document’s approach, which aims to further enhance the sector and overcome the discredit that has affected animal proteins in recent years. For ASSICA and Salumitalia, this represents an important step toward returning to dietary recommendations based on solid scientific evidence, which are also consistent from an economic and cultural perspective.
The stated objective is to promote a balanced approach to nutrition, capable of nourishing consumers, protecting producers, and recognizing the role of livestock supply chains within European food systems.
“For our sector, this is a complete rehabilitation that we hope will be confirmed in practice. The European Commission’s Communication represents the strategy and narrative we were hoping to read. Moreover, after the previous legislature seemed to believe the livestock sector was the root of all evil, much of the scientific community spontaneously responded by demonstrating, through the latest trends and technical-scientific orientations, that the production and consumption of animal products can be sustainable, both for health and the environment,” stated ASSICA President Lorenzo Beretta.
“First of all, I would like to thank the European Commission for this Communication,  which marks a significant shift in approach to the livestock sector and recognizes its economic, social, and productive value,” said Salumitalia President Cristiano Ludovici . “We are particularly pleased with the approach that emphasizes digitalization applied to animal welfare, including but not limited to, with particular reference to the use of new technologies in livestock farming and in transport and control systems.
The transition to a digital ecosystem represents an evolution capable of reducing administrative burdens, improving data reliability, and ensuring more effective and harmonized monitoring of regulatory compliance. This approach, thanks to the traceability and measurability of processes, opens the possibility of moving beyond overly prescriptive regulatory models in favor of concrete and verifiable objectives.
“It is essential,” Lorenzo Beretta continues , “to recognize the strategic value of excellent livestock clusters, understood as a unique global concentration of innovation, knowledge, and industrial capacity. In this context, a review of public policies affecting the sector is necessary, often geared toward reducing livestock numbers rather than accelerating technological progress and sustainability.
Finally, it is emphasized that weakening this sector is geopolitically risky in an era of growing strategic competition, while also producing significant and tangible economic damage and compromising the very environmental progress objectives that these policies purport to pursue. From this perspective, the communication represents a potential first step toward a clearer and more unequivocal public commitment to the sector’s strategic value and toward a decisive shift that places innovation as the primary instrument of European policies.
Assica and Salumitalia also reiterated the importance of launching a process aimed at creating a mutual fund for the management of risks associated with animal diseases, considered a strategic tool for structurally addressing health emergencies such as African swine fever and avian influenza.
The measure would address not only direct damages, but also indirect ones, filling the current insurance coverage gap for risks that are now recurring in various areas of the country and have significant economic repercussions for the entire supply chain.
