Feedstuffs Foodlink
 Rod Smith
July 20, 2012

There are 16.6 million people in the Netherlands, a small, urbanized country in which about 25 million pigs are grown every year, so those people are aware of those pigs and are increasingly concerned about how they are being produced, according to Dr. Hanneka Feitsma at Topigs.

Accordingly, pig producers need to participate in an evolving pork production chain in which "consumers have a right to ask," she said during a presentation to a five-member U.S. delegation at the Topigs offices in Beuningen.
The questions they ask determines producers' "license" to operate, and license requirements are pretty stiff by American standards, she acknowledged.

The pork production chain once was producer-processor-customer, Feitsma said. Now, its producer-processor-customer-consumer-citizen-society-voter, and this is why the questions are so tough, she said.

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