This year, the alert did not create the psychosis of 2006 winter among consumers but maintained however a concern at production level.

In this difficult context, the turkey production could hardly regain earlier crisis volumes.The main rea-son is the lack of turkey breeders so then the supply does not always answer the demand. However, the market is slowly recovering, and consequently, an increase is expected in spite of growing production costs.

The competitiveness of the sector has to be relaunched. At all stages of production, from farm to sale, turkey meat needs to regain its attractiveness. After all, turkey meat remains actually an attractive product, well placed in the market. However a consolidation of the market is still needed, particularly by ways of communication toward consumers and a good quality / price ratio.

Turkey sector’s stakeholders know it well. This year, a few European countries planned some project to promote turkey meat. Projects are focusing on the image of turkey meat, on the valorisation of its taste and on the way of cooking it, but also on nutritional and trendy aspects.

Beside this, histomonosis remains a great threat. Serious tracks seem to allow the hope of a solution, but the administrative complication constitutes a brake to its development.The industry will have to continue trying to get sufficient support of authorities in order to obtain authorizations for using an effective substance which prevents the pathology in flocks.

Also this year, the common interest of the legislation for animal welfare grew up. The willingness of the European Commission permitted the stakeholders from the turkey sector to focus on the better control of the relations between pododermatites and breeding parameters’.The avec ad hoc Turkey working group permitted to gather main European institutes and to develop with them a common research project with the objective to obtain European funds within the framework of the FP7 (7th generation of framework programme from the European Commission, DG Research).

Further Reading

Take a look at Avec's Annual Report for 2007 by clicking here.