There are officially 44 counties that are in Europe, 27 of these are in the EU. Each country is individual with its own market requirements. The comments in this report are general. Across Europe we are seeing record high pig prices and a declining pig herd. Its impossible to know exact numbers, but most indicators are there were about 6% to 7% less total pigs in Europe at the end of 2022 (134.3 million) than the average from 2017 to 2020 (about 143 million).
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Pig population in Europe 2017 145.5 million 2018 143.5 million 2019 143.1 million 2020 145.9 million 2021 141.6 million 2022 134.3 million Data from Statista suggests pig meat consumption in Europe will fall by 7.2% by 2031 vs a decline in meat consumption of 2.8%. So, what is going wrong for the pig industry in Europe. And can anything be done to stop the decline. Pig farmers in the European region are the most heavily legislated in the world for both environmental and animal welfare reasons. Regardless of this being wright or wrong or good or bad, the fact is it increases production cost. This extra cost and the cost of modifying farms is putting some farmers out of business. Every country that has ever done “high welfare” has lost about 50% of its pig production! This legislation is also increasing the price of pig meat in the shops for consumers! There is another issue here that European politicians seem to want to ignore. The systems that have the lowest impact on the ...
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