LyJa Cultural Mediain, in collaboration with Haier Financial Services, held the first Poultry Risk Management Seminar on April 26 in Shanghai, China. The event attracted professionals from the poultry industry, national research institutes and corporate executives from food service companies. The audience of more than 100 included representatives from Cargill Inc., the CP Group, Cobb-Vantress Inc., Hongxuan Agricultural Group and Yukou Poultry Co., Ltd. The inter-industrial event aimed to discuss the risks facing China’s poultry industry and strategies for responding to them.
Major risks
When it comes to animal husbandry, China’s poultry industry is still confronted with the biggest risks. Despite the highest level of intensification and modernization, major incidents frequently occur, especially in the poultry food sector. LyJa Cultural Media conducted an online survey in March; results showed that the top factors influencing the poultry industry are disease outbreaks, environmental protection and imbalance between supply and demand. After nearly a decade, China’s poultry industry is still in a mire of disease outbreaks.
Pelayo Casanovas, General Manager of Cobb Asia-Pacific, shared his views in a keynote speech about different influences avian influenza outbreaks impose upon chicken consumption in China, Europe and American countries. Casanovas said that after outbreaks of avian influenza, chicken consumption in China would remain stagnant in the following year or even longer, but in the U.S., the Netherlands and the U.K., local chicken consumption would recover within a very brief period. Casanovas thinks that backyard chicken farming and live bird markets pose a significant challenge to bird flu control and to the entire broiler industry. He says the prices of the broiler fluctuate like a roller coaster, and one of the reasons for that is the integration of China’s poultry supply chain, with only 60% of the supply chain integrated.
Price risk has been receiving much attention from the industry. Liu Li, an analyst from SCI Consulting, delivered a speech featuring the forecasts of the price trends in the egg and broiler markets. In the past three years, the number of laying hens has been on the increase, while the demand is not optimistic and the prices of eggs has been decreasing across the board since 2013, according to Li. “The quantity of eggs is expected to rise by 3% from the year 2016; for the year ahead, the market will still suffer from the oversupply of eggs.”
Improvement of risk control capability
“The ultimate goal of agricultural production is to provide sufficient, safe food. Food safety is a tricky issue in that it involves systematic planning. As far as food risk management is concerned, the efforts should be done in advance; the early warning system should be implemented in advance,” said Li Dingding, General Manager of LyJa Cultural Media, during her presentation.
Dingding analyzed the risks facing the poultry industry from the aspects of individual companies, strategies (national policies, trade and consumers) and the entire industrial chain. She stressed that the pig industry is given significant attention. In 2016, domestic pig farming received more support from the government but for the poultry industry, there are merely requirements of environmental protection, rather than specific policies.
For the major players in the industry, 26 newly listed companies are most concerned about disease outbreaks, government policies concerning environment and land and price fluctuations. According to Dingding, some of the companies begin to expand into food processing and development of new byproducts to evade the risks. In terms of biosecurity, a few companies such as Minhe Co., Ltd and Sunner Development have promoted their biosecurity standards meeting the requirements of MOA.
Dingding pointed out that the dietary patterns of the global population are changing, which means the business model of the producers should switch from single protein production or multi-protein production to food production and all the way to food services.
