COUNTRY FILE ▶▶▶
Five signs illustrating Germany’s fall
Germany proudly used to be Europe’s number #1 pig nation. In a few years, however, the country appears to have lost that status to Spain. The downfall of Germany as leading pig nation is closely interconnected with the reasons for its rise, as illustrated clearly by five indicators.
BY HANS-WILHELM WINDHORST* G Year
2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020
58,413 58,213 58,814 59,339 56,825 53,215
Source: MAPA 2021. 6 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 37, No. 10, 2021 Germany x1,000 Index:
(2010 = 100) 100.0 99.7
100.7 101.6 97.3 91.1
x1,000
40,847 41,594 43,484 49,048 52,289 56,461
ermany’s historical rise from being a leading importer of pig meat to the leading exporting country within less than three
decades has been a remarkable success story. The background of the economic success, how- ever – a high risk in dynamic development – has often been ignored. The rise to the top was not only based on domestic hog production, but depended to a high degree on unlimited imports of the raw ingredients for compound feed, imports of piglets and finisher pigs from the Netherlands and Denmark as well as being able to sell the pig meat on international markets. With that system, the farmers and large slaughterhouses in the northwest of Ger-
Table 1 – The development of pig slaughter in Germany and Spain between 2010 and 2020.
Spain Index:
(2010 = 100) 100.0 101.8 106.5 120.2 128.0 138.2
> 17,566 > 16,619 > 15,330 > 10,255 > 4,536 < 3,246
D > < E
many have been very successful. They expanded pro-
duction to make profit and used the profit for further ex- pansion. (One problem, which has not yet been solved, has been the surplus of manure, as it cannot be re-exported to the countries from which corn and soybeans are imported.) The system worked perfectly as long as the surplus of pig meat over the domestic demand could be exported, but when that was no longer possible, the system landed in economic trouble. How do we measure the abrupt fall?
1
Decreasing inventory In November 2012, Germany’s pig inventory reached its highest, with 28.3 million pigs. In the following years,
the inventory hovered around 27 million, before deceasing to less than 26 million in 2020. While inventory increases be- tween 2015 and 2020 were seen in Spain of 12.5%, in the US of 12.5% and in Denmark of 5.4%, the German inventory de- creased by almost 1.7 million pigs (5.9%) (see Figure 1).
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