Denmark must address the high mortality rate of piglets. Regulations should be introduced against »extreme breeding« of sows, which allows them to give birth to 20 piglets per litter. Routine tail docking must be stopped. Space conditions must be improved. And the transport of piglets out of the country should be more thoroughly controlled and shorter in duration.
These are the elements of a new proposal from Socialdemokratiet (S), announced the day after Mette Frederiksen declared in a TV debate with Troels Lund Poulsen on Sunday that it was time to »protect the pig«.
Thus, the major ruling party is now entering what has been dubbed the ’pig election’.
»We produce 40 million pigs, of which 10 million die as very young piglets. That is too many. The mortality rate is too high,« says Jeppe Bruus (S), Minister for Green Tripartite.
But there is another striking goal for Socialdemokratiet that was not mentioned in the TV debate.
Danish agriculture should stop exporting piglets out of the country to the extent it does now and instead raise and slaughter the pigs in Denmark.
»A little over half are exported as piglets. And we can significantly reduce that export and ensure that we have pigs that are raised and slaughtered in Denmark under better conditions,« says Jeppe Bruus.
Of Denmark’s 30 million pigs produced annually, around 17 million piglets are exported to primarily Poland and Germany, but also Italy, Romania, Serbia, the Netherlands, and other countries.
This happens because many Danish pig farms have specialized in producing piglets at a low price and uniform quality using specially bred sows.
How much should the export of piglets be reduced?
»I can’t put a number on it, but we would like to significantly reduce it. It is not realistic right now to completely shut down that export, as we also face some EU bureaucracy, but the welfare of the piglets being exported must be a high priority. Therefore, we would very much like to find a solution to this,« he says.
But the piglets won’t necessarily have better conditions growing up in Denmark?
»No, and therefore we need to look at the space in the barns and ensure that they are not tail-docked, as they are today in 95 percent of cases. And overall, that the production raised and ending up at the slaughterhouses has more focus on animal welfare,« says Bruus.
He points out that there are already increased requirements for future barns to reduce their impact on the local environment and climate, as well as increased requirements for better animal welfare.
Transport is key
Socialdemokratiet have some suggestions as to how Denmark should reduce the large export – Denmark exports more piglets than any other European country.
Jeppe Bruus points out that lowering the maximum transport time for pig transports from the current 24 hours to 8 hours would directly make parts of the Danish piglet export less profitable. Additionally, increased monitoring of transports to ensure they comply with regulations would also have a significant effect, says the minister.
There have also been other models on the table. Among other things, the parties looked at a model during the green tripartite discussions where all pigs would have the same fee – whether it was a piglet or a slaughter pig. This would incentivize keeping the pigs within the country’s borders. That idea did not come to fruition.
Several parties have been critical of the idea of limiting pig production during the election campaign. Party leader of the Danmarksdemokraterne, Inger Støjberg, believes that the result would be that the pigs »would just be produced in Poland«.
»Then we can get Polish pork driven in on diesel trucks, and that’s not an advantage,« she said over the weekend to DR. It has also been pointed out that a reduction in pig production would impact jobs in rural areas.
Jeppe Bruus strongly disagrees.
»It will create growth in our rural districts, jobs at our slaughterhouses, and in the entire processing industry,« he says.
»There aren’t that many jobs in producing a lot of piglets and transporting them out of the country.«
Parties in the red bloc are positive about Socialdemokratiet’s announcements.
»It confirms an old truth: If you really want to move Socialdemokratiet, you have to start by moving the voters. That’s what has happened in just a few weeks,« says Zenia Stampe, agricultural spokesperson for Radikale Venstre, who has been one of the main forces behind the past six months’ campaign among animal welfare organizations, activists, and politicians against conventional Danish pig production.
»Now we must determine whether it’s just empty talk or real proposals,« she says.
The political leader of Alternativet, Franciska Rosenkilde, is pleased that Socialdemokratiet have ’copied’ the points from Alternativet’s ’pig ultimatum,’ which came at the beginning of the election campaign. But the prerequisite for it to become a reality is a red majority, she says.
»The red parties also stood together with Socialdemokratiet in the 2022 election and promised Danes clean drinking water. That was not delivered,« she says.
The price of the pig
The goal of ensuring better animal welfare for Danish pigs comes with a price – or at least many would argue: namely, more expensive meat in the refrigerated section. It’s a sensitive issue in an election campaign that also deals with rising prices.
It can’t be any different than the price of pork rising when animal welfare improves?
»Actually, it can be a bit different. There is currently a high mortality rate of piglets, which also incurs production costs to handle. And if you then have better animal welfare and more space and thus lower mortality, you also save some of your production costs,« says Jeppe Bruus.
But if we introduce too strict requirements, some believe we will end up like Sweden, importing meat from abroad. And then we’ve just outsourced the problem.
»That’s a fundamental discussion we have about the transformation of this society. We’ve had the same discussion about the transformation of our industry and CO2 taxes. But that’s not what we’ve seen,« he says.
»The argument that if we set some requirements, it costs a whole lot of jobs is only true if we don’t have the ability to develop and create new technologies,« he says.
