Abstract
In Germany, the market share of organic meat (pork, beef, poultry, etc.) is less than 1.8% and organic pork meat is even lower. In 2016, the total production volume of organic pork amounted approximately to 250,000 slaughtered pigs, whereas in the conventional sector, nearly 60 million pigs are slaughtered every year. The German self-sufficiency degree in organic pork meat varies over the years and was around 70–75% in 2016. This lack of organic pork meat is covered by imports mainly from Denmark and The Netherlands. Thanks to a growing demand, German producers of organically fattened pigs can rely on stable and high prices compared to conventional fluctuating prices. This is one of the reasons why German production of organic pork is continuously growing since 2015.
Regarding slaughterhouses and processors for organic pork, there are six main players in Germany dealing with three fourth of the total volume plus a series of small to medium-sized companies, slaughtering organic pigs 1 or 2 days per week. Most of the production is commercialized through organized value chains with long term contracts made with specialized organic producers’ organizations. Organic pork is offered to consumers through all kind of distribution channels, including direct selling.
Organic pork outperforms its conventional reference along most of the sustainability indicators assessed in this chapter. The two notable exceptions are exports, as Germany is not self-sufficient in organic pork, and water pollution from nitrates: while organic pork production is less polluting on an area basis, its lower productivity implies a larger discharge of nitrogen per ton of meat.
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Notes
- 1.
See: Smith-Spangler et al. (2012).
- 2.
There are no statistics on the number of such farmers, there must be at least 250 farmers in Germany, rearing both: piglets and fattening pigs (source: Destatis 2017, p. 43).
- 3.
Farms with less than 50 pig places and which are under the thresholds for the other production branches are not taken into consideration by Destatis.
- 4.
A survey by AMI is ongoing in 2017/2018 on butcheries as well as on direct selling farmers in order to get more solid information on these two channels.
- 5.
A private certification organization is a union of organically producing farmers and manufacturers – with the purpose to support the common marketing and control of the products. The first organization was “Demeter” founded in 1924 and their requirements are higher than those laid down in the EU regulation on organic farming. The most important organic certification organizations in Germany for pork meat are Bioland, Naturland, Demeter, Biokreis, Biopark and Gäa. These certifiers have their own standards (“EU+”) which are checked by the yearly mandatory controls of German control bodies. Approximately 60% of organic pigs in Germany are certified by Naturland. Some of these farmer’s associations have created “market actors” in different value chains and with different organization forms. These stakeholders then buy and sell pork meat. Exampels are the “Vermarktungsgesellschaft Bio-Bauern mbH (Bioland)” or the “Marktgesellschaft der Naturland Bauern AG”.
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Böhm, M., Gauvrit, L., Schaer, B. (2019). Organic Pork in Germany. In: Arfini, F., Bellassen, V. (eds) Sustainability of European Food Quality Schemes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27508-2_17
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